Haaretz.com All headlines RSS /bloomberg/cmlink/haaretz-com-all-headlines-rss-1.4605102 Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:51:53https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/kurds-welcome-u-s-plan-to-keep-peacekeeping-force-in-syria-1.6959626
1.6959626Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:51:53ReutersFri, 22 Feb 2019 15:21:44Kurdish-led forces in Syria said they would complete the evacuation of thousands of civilians from Islamic State's last redoubt in the area on Friday, and welcomed a White House reversal of President Donald Trump's decision to pull out all U.S. troops.

With Washington's allies poised for victory against Islamic State fighters making a final stand in a pocket near the Iraqi border, the White House announced plans on Thursday to keep "a small peacekeeping force" of 200 troops in Syria.

The announcement partially reversed Trump's abrupt decision in December to withdraw the entire 2,000-strong U.S. contingent, which had alarmed Washington's Kurdish allies and prompted Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to quit.

>> Between Erdogan and the Ayatollahs, these women lead the Kurdish battle for freedom ■ Is Trump about to become the third U.S. leader to betray the Kurds?

Although the U.S. contingent would now be small, Kurdish leaders suggested it could have a major impact on the fate of the area, preventing a security vacuum. Washington could retain control of the air space and its European allies could complement the force with more troops.

The planned assault on the final Islamic State redoubt in the area, Baghouz, would effectively end the territorial rule of the jihadist group, which ruled around a third of both Iraq and Syria at its self-proclaimed Caliphate's height four years ago.

Reporters near the front line at Baghouz saw dozens of trucks leaving loaded with civilians, and empty ones driving inside accompanied by fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia.

Mustafa Bali, an SDF spokesman, said the evacuation would be completed on Friday, with thousands of civilians still inside the pocket from an estimated 7,000 at the start of the day. More than 20,000 civilians have left Baghouz in recent weeks, according to previous SDF estimates.

The U.S.-led coalition which supports the SDF has said Islamic State's "most hardened fighters" are holed up inside.

"If we succeed in evacuating all the civilians, at any moment we will take the decision to storm Baghouz or force the terrorists to surrender," said Bali.

Though the fall of Baghouz would mark a milestone in the campaign against Islamic State, the militant group is still seen as a security threat, using guerrilla tactics and still holding some territory in a remote area west of the Euphrates River.

Reversal welcomed The battle against Islamic State in the area has taken place since December in the shadow of Trump's abrupt decision to withdraw all U.S. troops, which raised doubt about the future of the fighters that had served as U.S. allies on the ground.

The Kurdish-led authorities in the north welcomed the White House reversal. They had feared that a total U.S. withdrawal would leave their area exposed to attack by Turkey, which sees the main Kurdish militia as a national security threat.

"We evaluate the White House decision ... positively," Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of foreign relations in the region held by the U.S.-backed SDF told Reuters.

"This decision may encourage other European states, particularly our partners in the international coalition against terrorism, to keep forces in the region," Omar added. "I believe that keeping a number of American troops and a larger number of (other) coalition troops, with air protection, will play a role in securing stability and protecting the region too."

The SDF's top commander earlier this week called for 1,000 to 1,500 international troops to remain in Syria to help fight Islamic State and expressed hope Washington would halt Trump's plans for a total pullout.

A Western diplomat said it remained to be seen whether European allies would contribute troops, or whether the force would be able to secure the area.

"Even if 200 troops remain and the U.S. decides to continue claiming the airspace, it's not clear whether that would convince Britain, France and other partners to stay -- and whether that could keep the Syrian regime out of the northeast for now, or Turkey, or an IS resurgence."

The Kurds, who want to preserve the autonomy they have carved out, have made overtures to President Bashar al-Assad, urging government forces to deploy at the borders as Washington withdraws. The U.S. decision may strengthen the Kurds' hand.

"I believe that these forces in this region ... will be a motivation, an incentive and also a means of pressure on Damascus to try seriously to have a dialogue to resolve the Syrian crisis," Omar said.

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1.6959524Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:25:53Amira HassFri, 22 Feb 2019 14:05:12The dream that came true, in the form of a two-inch water line, was too good to be true. For about six months, 12 Palestinian West Bank villages in the South Hebron Hills enjoyed clean running water. That was until February 13, when staff from the Israeli Civil Administration, accompanied by soldiers and Border Police and a couple of bulldozers, arrived.

The troops dug up the pipes, cut and sawed them apart and watched the jets of water that spurted out. About 350 cubic meters of water were wasted. Of a 20 kilometer long (12 mile) network, the Civil Administration confiscated remnants and sections of a total of about 6 kilometers of piping. They loaded them on four garbage trucks emblazoned with the name of the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan on them.

The demolition work lasted six and a half hours. Construction of the water line network had taken about four months. It had been a clear act of civil rebellion in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King against one of the most brutal bans that Israel imposes on Palestinian communities in Area C, the portion of the West Bank under full Israeli control. It bars Palestinians from hooking into existing water infrastructure.

The residential caves in the Masafer Yatta village region south of Hebron and the ancient cisterns used for collecting rainwater confirm the local residents’ claim that their villages have existed for decades, long before the founding of the State of Israel. In the 1970s, Israel declared some 30,000 dunams (7,500 acres) in the area Firing Range 918.

In 1999, under the auspices of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the army expelled the residents of the villages and demolished their structures and water cisterns. The government claimed that the residents were trespassing on the firing range, even though these were their lands and they have lived in the area long before the West Bank was captured by Israel.

When the matter was brought to the High Court of Justice, the court approved a partial return to the villages but did not allow construction or hookups to utility infrastructure. Mediation attempts failed, because the state was demanding that the residents leave their villages and live in the West Bank town of Yatta and come to graze their flocks and work their land only on a few specific days per year.

But the residents continued to live in their homes, risking military raids and demolition action — including the demolition of public facilities such as schools, medical clinics and even toilets. They give up a lot to maintain their way of life as shepherds, but could not forgo water.

“The rainy season has grown much shorter in recent years, to only about 45 days a year,” explained Nidal Younes, the chairman of the Masafer Yatta council of villages. “In the past, we didn’t immediately fill the cisterns with rainwater, allowing them to be washed and cleaned first. Since the amount of rain has decreased, people stored water right away. It turns out the dirty water harmed the sheep and the people.”

Because the number of residents has increased, even in years with abundant rain, at a certain stage the cisterns ran dry and the shepherds would bring in water by tractor. They would haul a 4 cubic meter (140 square foot) tank along the area’s narrow, poor roads — which Israel does not permit to have widened and paved. “The water has become every family’s largest expense,” Younes said.

In the village of Halawa, he pointed out Abu Ziyad, a man of about 60. “I always see him on a tractor, bringing in water or setting out to bring back water.”

Sometimes the tractors overturn and drivers are injured. Tires quickly wear out and precious work days go to waste. “We are drowning in debt to pay for the transportation of water,” Abu Ziyad said.

In 2017, the Civil Administration and the Israeli army closed and demolished the roads to the villages, which the council had earlier managed to widen and rebuild. That had been done to make it easier to haul water in particular, but also more generally to give the villages better access.

The right-wing Regavim non-profit group “exposed” the great crime committed in upgrading the roads and pressured the Civil Administration and the army to rip them up. “The residents’ suffering increased,” Younes remarked. “We asked ourselves how to solve the water problem.”

The not very surprising solution was installing pipes to carry the water from the main water line in the village of Al-Tuwani, through privately owned lands of the other villages. “I checked it out, looking to see if there was any ban on laying water lines on private land and couldn’t find one,” Younes said.

Work done by volunteers

The plumbing work was done by volunteers, mostly at night and without heavy machinery, almost with their bare hands. Ali Debabseh, 77, of the village of Khalet al-Daba, recalled the moment when he opened the spigot installed near his home and washed his face with running water. “I wanted to jump for joy. I was as happy as a groom before his wedding.”

Umm Fadi of the village of Halawa also resorted to the word “joy” in describing the six months when she had a faucet near the small shack in which she lives. “The water was clean, not brown from rust or dust. I didn’t need to go as far as the cistern to draw water, didn’t need to measure every drop.”

Now it’s more difficult to again get used to being dependent on water dispensed from tanks.

The piping and connections and water meters were bought with a 100,000 euro ($113,000) European donation. Instead of paying 40 shekels ($11) per cubic meter for water brought in with water tanks, the residents paid only about 6 shekels for the same amount of running water. Suddenly they not only saved money, but also had more precious time.

The water lines also could have saved European taxpayers money. A European project to help the residents remain in their homes had been up and running since 2011, providing annual funding of 120,000 euros to cover the cost of buying and transporting drinking water during the three summer months for the residents (but not their livestock).

The cost was based on a calculation involving consumption of 750 liters per person a month, far below the World Health Organization’s recommended quantity. There are between 1,500 and 2,000 residents. The project made things much easier for such a poor community, which continued to pay out of its own pocket for the water for some 40,000 sheep and for the residents’ drinking water during the remainder of the year. Now that the Civil Administration has demolished the water lines, the European donor countries may be forced to once again pay for the high price of transporting water during the summer months, at seven times the cost.

For its part, the Civil Administration issued a statement noting that the area is a closed military zone. “On February 13,” the statement said, “enforcement action was taken against water infrastructure that was connected to illegal structures in this area and that were built without the required permits.”

Ismail Bahis should have been sorry that the pipes were laid last year. He and his brothers, residents of Yatta, own water tankers and were the main water suppliers to the Masafer Yatta villages. Through a system of coupons purchased with the European donation, they received 800 shekels for every shipment of 20 cubic meters of water. But Bahis said he was happy he had lost out on the work.

“The roads to the villages of Masafer Yatta are rough and dangerous, particularly after the army closed them,” he said. “Every trip of a few kilometers took at least three and a half hours. Once I tipped over with the tanker. Another time the army confiscated my brother’s truck, claiming it was a closed military zone. We got the truck released three weeks later in return for 5,000 shekels. We always had other additional expenses replacing tires and other repairs for the truck.

Nidal Younes recounted that the council signed a contract with another water carrier to meet the demand. But that supplier quit after three weeks. He wouldn’t agree to drive on the poor and dangerous roads.

On February 13, Younes heard the large group of forces sent by the Civil Administration beginning to demolish the water lines near the village of Al-Fakhit. He rushed to the scene and began arguing with the soldiers and Civil Administration staff.

Border Police arrests

Border Police officers arrested him, handcuffed him and put him in a jeep. His colleague, the head of the Al-Tuwani council, Mohammed al-Raba’i, also approached those carrying out the demolition work to protest. “But they arrested me after I said two words. At least Nidal managed to say a lot,” he said with a smile that concealed sadness.

Two teams carried out the demolition work, one proceeding toward the village of Jinbah, to the southeast, the second advanced in the direction of Al-Tuwani, to the northwest. They also demolished the access road leading to the village of Sha’ab al-Butum, so that even if Bahis wanted to transport water again, he would have had to make a large detour to do so.

Younes was shocked to spot a man named Marco among the team carrying out the demolition. “I remembered him from when I was a child, from the 1980s when he was an inspector for the Civil Administration. In 1985, he supervised the demolition of houses in our village, Jinbah — twice, during Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr [marking the end of the Ramadan holy month],” he said.

“They knew him very well in all the villages in the area because he attended all the demolitions. The name Marco was a synonym for an evil spirit. Our parents who saw him demolish their homes, have died. He disappeared, and suddenly he has reappeared,” Younes remarked.

Marco is Marco Ben-Shabbat, who has lead the Civil Administration’s supervision unit for the past 10 years. Speaking to a reporter from the Israel Hayom daily who accompanied the forces carrying out the demolition work, Ben-Shabbat said: “The [water line] project was not carried out by the individual village. The Palestinian Authority definitely put a project manager here and invested a lot of money.”

More precisely, it was European governments that did so.

From all of the villages where the Civil Administration destroyed water lines, the Jewish outposts of Mitzpeh Yair and Avigayil can be seen on the hilltops. Although they are unauthorized and illegal even according to lenient Israeli settlement laws, the outposts were connected almost immediately to water and electricity grids and paved roads lead to them.

“I asked why they demolished the water lines,” Nidal Younes recalled. He said one of the Border Police officers answered him, in English, telling him it was done "to replace Arabs with Jews."

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1.6959388Fri, 22 Feb 2019 15:01:24Guy ErezFri, 22 Feb 2019 09:52:09September 3, 2016 was supposed to have been a festive day for the Israeli space industry, with the launch of the $200 million advanced Amos 6 communications satellite. It was the pride and joy of Israel Aerospace Industries, which was set to replace the aging Amos 2 satellite.

Except that two days earlier, as it sat on a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher at Cape Canaveral, Florida, the satellite was completely destroyed in an explosion that occurred during a test ignition of the launch rocket’s engines.

>> Read more: How Israel Aerospace went from sky high to free fall

Three months later, a commission established in the wake of the explosion found that the communications satellite industry in Israel was facing a serious crisis, and advised that the government take measures to maintain the country’s standing as a technology and space power, and to become one the few countries capable of launching communications satellites.

The commission did not specify whether Israel had to build the satellites itself or just launch them. The difference is highly significant, as it touches on the question of whether the satellite will be built by IAI – a government company with a politically powerful union – or by a foreign company.

After the findings were publicized, Science, Technology and Space Minister Ofir Akunis announced his commitment to building another communications satellite. “There is the concern that Israel won’t be able to meet its communications needs in an emergency, and we will face a loss of the knowledge that has accumulated over the years,” Akunis said.

Despite recognizing the importance of the issue, Israel is still struggling to put the pieces back together. The cabinet decided six months ago to fund the construction of the Amos 8 by IAI, but the work has yet to begin. Spacecom, a company that operates communications satellites, has not put in the order for it. Their manufacturing specifications are incomplete and the money promised by the government has not yet been released in full.

No one can say with any certainty when construction of the satellite will begin, let alone be completed, and when it would be launched. Communications satellites made in Israel are an important component of the national space program. They ensure the country’s communications independence. They also have important military applications, and although officials decline to elaborate on them, they apparently include observation, spying and monitoring beyond the country’s borders.

Three main players

Three main players are supposed to take part in the project of launching Israel’s next communications satellite, the Amos 8: Spacecom, the Israeli government and IAI. Spacecom is the company that orders, launches and operates the satellite in orbit. The government is the main client for the satellite. IAI, which was selected to do the job, is the only company in Israel capable of building satellites.

IAI has a built-in disadvantage compared to foreign companies that regularly build communications satellites and as a government company is plagued by inefficiency. However, it is important that it be the one to manufacture the satellite, as doing so will enable Israel to maintain its capabilities in this field.

“Today there is no country in the world that doesn’t use satellite communications,” says Tal Inbar, an international aerospace expert. “Some countries purchase communications services from other countries, and some do their own satellite operations, whether it’s with satellites purchased from others or ones they built themselves. There’s no need to explain how vital this communication resource is to every country. A portion of civilian communications in Israel depends on undersea fiber communications systems, and that can be vulnerable to natural disaster, sabotage or foreign suppliers deciding to cut us off under certain political conditions. Satellite communication is much more convenient and immune from disruptions,” says Inbar.

“Since building a communications satellite costs a lot of money, it has been rare for many years to see communications satellites that are 100% military. The current model is to build a dual satellite – that can handle civilian or commercial needs alongside security needs. There is no technical problem in separating the different uses.”

Politicians were the ones who called communications satellites a key strategic need that impacts Israel’s national security as well as its industry, economy, technology and international standing.

“Israel’s importance as a technological and space power isn’t just a matter of gratification or technological superiority,” Akunis said in late 2016. “It is a vital need to ensure Israel’s survival by being able to control its own future and not having to rely on the kindness of other countries.”

But the state comptroller report last October found that the government’s handling of the matter sorely lacking, endangering Israel’s capabilities and the technological and human infrastructure that was built over decades.

While professionals in the field say that a new satellite must be ordered every three to four years in conjunction with a requisite budget in order to sustain the communications satellite industry in Israel, this goal seems to be overly ambitious, given the clumsy way that relevant officials, especially policy makers, have handled the issue.

Inbar, former head of the Space Research Center at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies and a founder of the Israel Space Agency, says that only a small number of countries are capable of building communications satellites. Israel did it for the first time in 1996 with the Amos 1 satellite.

Like many others, Inbar cannot comprehend why there is such a gap between government decisions and their execution.

“Israel decided that it wants independence in the field of communications satellites. As the state comptroller said, it’s very nice they made that decision, but the decision has economic significance. Just as the Ofek satellite had a mother and father in the Defense Ministry, someone has to take on the responsibility of managing the project and obtaining the right budget. An odd situation has become the rule when it comes to satellite communications, for some reason; the government says that it’s vital and strategic, but then it doesn’t allocate the money for it.”

Anger at IAI

So what exactly happened with the Amos 8 and why isn’t this project underway yet? Here is the somewhat odd sequence of events.

IAI competed in early 2018 to build the satellite, but Spacecom awarded a $122 million contract to Loral Space & Communications, a U.S. company. Spacecom rejected IAI’s bid because it was more expensive and would take longer to execute

This was the second time in a row that Spacecom chose a company other than IAI, which had built the Amos 2, Amos 3, Amos 4 and Amos 6 satellites. The previous time was when it chose the American company Boeing to build the Amos 17, which is due to be launched in the second quarter of 2019, for $160 million.

The choice of Loral infuriated IAI officials, who warned that if they did not build the next satellite for Spacecom, all the knowledge that had been built up would go down the drain and the harmful repercussions would be felt for years to come. Although they had a clear interest in making such an assertion, there is some truth to it, according to the state comptroller.

IAI did its utmost to prevent Spacecom from purchasing the satellite from another company. About a month after Spacecom’s announcement that it was going with the American company, IAI told the government that it would manufacture, launch and independently operate a communications satellite that would meet Israel’s needs and deprive Spacecom of its biggest customer.

This offer was widely considered unrealistic, but IAI was nevertheless able to exert its influence on the policy makers. As defense minister Avigdor Lieberman, citing security needs, ultimately decided that IAI would produce the satellite.

Spacecom was informed that if the satellite were not built in Israel, it would lose the government as a client. The company had no choice. Launching another satellite was supposed to be the move that would rescue the unlucky company that had lost two satellites in recent years (in addition to Amos 6, contact with Amos 5 was lost in late 2015). Spacecom aimed to launch two satellites by 2020 (Amos 17, which is due to be launched in a few months, and Amos 8, to be launched a year later).

The Science Ministry announced last April that it was working to acquire a communications satellite via IAI rather than Spacecom.

A week later, Yair Katz, chairman of the IAI union, congratulated those who helped to keep the satellite production in Israel during a Channel 10 interview.

“It’s thanks to our ability to reach the decision makers. If they would have disappointed us – they probably wouldn’t receive the workers’ trust again in the Likud primary,” he said, not bothering to hide the way in which IAI exerts the pressure.

How did they overcome the cost difference between the foreign company’s proposal and IAI’s proposal, given that Spacecom wasn’t ready to pay the extra money for the sake of national interests?

The cabinet decided to bridge the difference between the cost of the foreign satellite and the Israeli satellite. For reasons that are unclear, the government and IAI refuse to reveal the amount of the financing. It is estimated at $90 million, but there is no information as to how much each ministry will chip in.

No money, no specs

The government’s decision to cover the cost differential could have been the end of the story. But anyone who thought that work on the blue-and-white satellite would start right away was sadly mistaken. More than six months have passed since the government said it would use taxpayer money to cover the extra cost, but construction has not yet begun.

“The government hasn’t put the money it was supposed to put,” says someone involved in the matter. “There were supposed to be several budget sources. Some were utilized and some just never arrived.”

IAI responded: “IAI has not yet received an order from the client to build Amos 8. IAI is maintaining the technical ability for satellite communications in Israel and eagerly awaits the arrival of the order to commence building the satellite.”

The Finance Ministry commented: “The Finance Ministry gave the funding to the Science Ministry in accordance with its commitments on the matter. To the best of our knowledge, there are no delays here.” The Science Ministry stated: “The Science Ministry signed a contract with IAI for the funding of satellite technology development and is upholding its commitment.”

Surprisingly, even the specifications for the satellite are not yet complete. Spacecom doesn’t yet know if the Yes satellite company will be its customer for Amos 8. Yes’ parent company, Bezeq, does not plan to use Spacecom’s services after 2026, because it plans to shift to broadcasting via internet by then. Therefore, Spacecom will need different specifications for a business plan that does not include Yes, which has been a major client responsible for about a third of the company’s revenue in recent years (the Israeli government was responsible for another third).

Spacecom is trying to put together a business plan that will ensure it economic feasibility at least equivalent to the initial agreement with Loral, and is letting the government understand that it will not agree to pay more in order to subsidize IAI.

“They won’t move ahead with the Amos-8 plan until they are able to fix the sums from all the relevant parties – Yes, the government, IAI – in order to finalize the business outline making the project feasible,” says a source familiar with the situation who asked not to be identified.

Even when Spacecom has specifications for the Amos 8 ready, financing won’t be easy. The company has lost more than 65% of its market cap in the past year and is currently valued at just 125 million shekels ($34.5 million). It bonds trade at junk yields, indicating market uncertainty as to whether it can repay its debt. A bond issue to purchase a satellite would be particularly costly for it.

It’s hard to understand why the government, especially the Science Ministry, is dragging its feet. “I admit I haven’t held a discussion on the matter lately. Add to that the fact that we have an election coming up, and we have the potential for some very serious damage here,” Likud MK Yoav Kish, chairman of the Knesset subcommittee on space, says candidly.

“The first thing that needs to be done is to take care of Amos 8, but unfortunately we’re not sufficiently ready for that. The government decision was completed, but the ministries have not released all of the designated funds.”

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1.6959536Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:19:13Anshel PfefferFri, 22 Feb 2019 14:19:16The battle lines have been drawn. By Thursday night, the parties handed in their slates to the Central Elections Committee; we now know which parties are running, which have dropped out, which have merged and which candidate is on what spot on every list. The six and a half weeks until April 9 represent the real campaign.

The next prime minister will be either Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz. The linkup between the former military chief’s Hosen L’Yisrael party and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid has made their new Kahol Lavan (Blue White) alliance – led by Gantz – a real contender to Likud.

But to win, it won’t be enough for Gantz or Netanyahu to emerge as the leader of the largest party (or second-largest by a very small margin). They will need a bloc of parties with a majority in the new Knesset. Since the Arab parties won’t be joining any coalition government, there’s a distinct possibility that neither Netanyahu nor Gantz will have a majority and the result will be deadlock. A national-unity government led by either of the two can’t be ruled out.

>> Read more: Can Gantz pull a Trump? ■ Gantz and Lapid's new party has a single ideology: To replace Netanyahu ■ Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain't seen nothing yet

Three questions will decide the result.

Who's a rightist? Netanyahu's right-wing and religious bloc has more potential voters. For Gantz and the center-left bloc to deny Netanyahu a fifth term, he must convince enough “soft” right-wingers who are tired of Netanyahu that Kahol Lavan isn't “tainted” by leftism and even leans slightly rightward.

Netanyahu has been gunning for Gantz for a month now, trying to brand him as “weak left.” Gantz has appointed prominent ex-Likudniks to his ticket and produced online videos of carnage in Gaza to prove his right-wing credentials. The brand that sticks will decide the election.

Who won’t make it through? At least half a dozen parties, on both the right and the left, are hovering around the 3.25-percent electoral threshold. If Yisrael Beiteinu or Kulanu on the right fall under, or Meretz or Balad on the left, the votes for them are lost. And without their seats in the Knesset, the winning bloc could lose its majority, obstructing Netanyahu or Gantz’s path to a coalition.

Will indictments define the race? Very soon, perhaps next week, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit is expected to announce corruption indictments, pending a hearing, against Netanyahu. Even though many of the details have already been leaked to the press, the actual publishing of the charges would be a political earthquake that could become a pivotal moment in the campaign.

Will charges of bribery and fraud push some disgusted right-wing voters over to Gantz, or will they rally the members of Netanyahu’s base, convinced that their champion is the victim of a witch hunt?

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1.6959559Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:09:20Jack KhouryFri, 22 Feb 2019 13:21:18Now that the slates have been finalized, the four parties that made up the Joint List in the outgoing Knesset will have to address the eroding trust among their voters. This lack of trust has worsened over the past week, owing its state to the actions of its leaders and the character of the negotiations conducted between the four parts of the list as they attempted to recreate a united slate to run in the upcoming election.

The negotiations continued on Thursday night, up until the last minute before the deadline for filing the April 9 election party slates. The four parties were also prepared to run as two separate lists: Ahmad Tibi’s Ta’al with Ayman Odeh’s Hadash, and Balad with the United Arab List (Ra’am). In either case, the damage – and the deep rupture between the parties and the Arab public – was already done.

Now the four parties will have to answer the hard questions raised during the week in an attempt to restore its voters' trust in them, and to convince the indifferent among them to come out and vote on Election Day. The party leaders and candidates have been speaking in the loftiest terms about national responsibility, the need to stop the far right and the need to bring about the end of the Netanyahu government, which legislated the nation-state law and plans to bring Kahanists into the Knesset.

It would seem that these are important messages that should find a receptive audience among a very large group of voters. In reality, though, these same voters were exposed until Thursday night to battles of ego and unnecessary wars over the division of the Knesset seats and jobs, and the mudslinging by every party against the others. It was a scene that can only be described as humiliating, and which will only exacerbate the disgust of many of the parties’ voters, many of whom may now boycott the election.

The real fight

Within the four parties, they all admit that the main dispute focused on who would be awarded spots 11 to 14 on the joint slate. Hadash and UAL stubbornly insisted that each of the two parties would have four spots in the first 12 – places that are considered likely to enter the Knesset based on the polls – while Balad and Ta’al demanded the other two parties be satisfied with just three seats. In the end, the dispute was almost entirely focused on the chances of each party’s most marginal candidates.

This makes it clear to what extent the parties understand the depth of the disappointment of their voters in the Arab community, a disappointment that will translate into low voter turnout and the leakage of votes to the Zionist parties. Even in their own internal estimates, the parties believe the joint slate is unlikely to win 13 Knesset seats, and certainly not 14. This is a clear sign of a lack of confidence. In any other case, the parties would have set a clear target of at least 15 Knesset seats – a result that originally could have been considered logical and realistic for four parties deeply rooted in Arab society and which claim to properly represent them and have achieved so much.

The voter turnout among Arabs was 63 percent in the previous election, almost 9 percent higher than in the 2013 election. The Joint List’s momentum led to a significant rise in the number of Arab voters, and this was the result of the hope and warm relations among the parties and activists. Whether the parties would have run on one or two slates, it is now unlikely that we will see this high voter turnout again.

Party activists will go from door to door in the next few weeks trying to recruit voters. Most Arab mayors will join in the effort. But the same group of voters that made the difference in previous campaigns, the non-ideological, educated middle class, will not hurry this time to answer the call.

These voters will demand answers and clarifications before they agree to cast their ballots. There are a number of party activists among them who will protest the way the parties hooked up. It is no secret that many in Hadash are angry over the agreement with Tibi, and there are those in both Balad and the Islamic Movement who do not see the merger as a natural choice.

True, a month and a half remains until Election Day, quite a lot of time in terms of politics. The question is whether the Arab parties will take advantage of this time to draw the necessary conclusions quickly and then turn to their public with a campaign that includes appropriate messaging, that manages to minimize the damage caused by the last week – or will they continue along the same lines of ego battles and internal warfare that will seriously damage their electoral chances – and what remains of the public’s trust in the parties.

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1.6959464Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:42:22The Associated PressFri, 22 Feb 2019 11:12:24Islamic State fighters facing defeat in Syria are slipping across the border into Iraq, where they are destabilizing the country's fragile security, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Hundreds — likely more than 1,000 — ISIS fighters have crossed the open, desert border in the past six months, defying a massive operation by U.S., Kurdish, and allied forces to stamp out the remnants of the jihadi group in eastern Syria, according to three Iraqi intelligence officials and a U.S. military official.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on intelligence matters. But indications of the extremist group's widening reach in Iraq are clear.

Cells operating in four northern provinces are carrying out kidnappings, assassinations, and roadside ambushes aimed at intimidating locals and restoring the extortion rackets that financed the group's rise to power six years ago.

"ISIS is trying to assert itself in Iraq, because of the pressure it is under in Syria," said Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasoul, the Iraqi army spokesman.

The militants can count between 5,000 and 7,000 among their ranks in Iraq, where they are hiding out in the rugged terrain of remote areas, according to one intelligence official.

In Syria, Kurdish-led forces backed by the U.S.-led coalition have cornered the militants in a pocket less than one square kilometer in Baghouz, a Euphrates River village near the 600-kilometer (370-mile) border.

The Iraqi army has deployed more than 20,000 troops to guard the frontier, but militants are slipping across, mostly to the north of the conflict zone, in tunnels or under the cover of night. Others are entering Iraq disguised as cattle herders.

They are bringing with them currency and light weapons, according to intelligence reports, and digging up money and arms from caches they stashed away when they controlled a vast swath of northern Iraq.

"If we deployed the greatest militaries in the world, they would not be able to control this territory," Rasoul said. "Our operations require intelligence gathering and airstrikes."

At its height in 2014 and 2015, the Islamic State group ruled over a self-proclaimed "caliphate" that spanned one-third of Iraqi and Syrian territory. The extremist offshoot of Al-Qaida in Iraq threatened to exterminate religious minorities.

Iraqi forces, with U.S., Iranian, and other international help, were able to turn the war around and Baghdad declared victory over the group in December 2017, after the last urban battle had been won.

But precursors to ISIS have recovered from major setbacks in the past, and many fear the militants could stage a comeback. The group is already waging a low-level insurgency in rural areas.

The Associated Press verified nine ISIS attacks in Iraq in January alone, based on information gathered from intelligence officials, provincial leaders, and social media. ISIS often boasts of its activities through group messaging apps such as Telegram.

In one instance, a band of militants broke into the home of a man they accused of being an informant for the army, in the village of Tal al-Asfour in the northern Badush region. They shot him and his two brothers against the wall, and posted photos of the killing on social media.

Sheikh Mohamed Nouri, a local tribal leader, said it was meant to intimidate locals in order to keep them from sharing intelligence with security officials.

"I have members of our tribal militia receiving threatening messages warning them to abandon their work," said Nouri.

In other instances, ISIS cells have killed mukhtars — village leaders and municipal officials. They have attacked rural checkpoints with car bombs and mortar fire, and burned down militia members' homes. In the Shurgat area in central Iraq, militants stopped a police vehicle last month and killed all four officers inside.

Other activities have aimed at restoring the group's financial footing.

On Sunday, militants kidnapped a group of 12 truffle hunters in the western Anbar province, marking a return to a strategy of intimidating and extorting farmers and traders for financial gain.

Naim Kaoud, the head of provincial security, urged locals to suspend truffle gathering, which has just one season a year and is an important source of income for rural families.

Other truffle hunters have disappeared in the countryside, according to former lawmaker and Anbar tribal figure Jaber al-Jaberi. He said the militants are taking cuts from truffle hunters in exchange for access to the land, and kidnapping or killing those who refuse to cooperate.

"This is one of the sources of their funding," said al-Jaberi.

Al-Jaberi cautioned against exaggerating the ISIS threat, saying the militants have been less successful at infiltrating communities than they were earlier this decade.

"These are different times," he said.

Others are not so sure. Hans-Jakob Schindler, a former adviser to the U.N. Security Council on ISIS and other extremist groups, said the same grievances that gave rise to ISIS in 2013 remain today, including a large Sunni minority that feels politically and economically marginalized by the Shiite-led central government.

"I'm very worried that we are just repeating history," said Schindler, who is now at the Counter Extremism Project.

He said he has seen ISIS "revert to the old type" of "classical terror attacks" and kidnapping for ransom, tactics that were once widely employed by al-Qaida in Iraq.

The militants staged a dramatic resurgence after 2011, when U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq and civil war broke out in neighboring Syria. Today some 5,200 American forces are based in Iraq, after they were invited back to help stem the ISIS rampage in 2014.

After President Donald Trump promised in December to pull American forces out of Syria, Iraqi lawmakers began clamoring for the U.S. to leave, arguing that the mission against ISIS was approaching its end.

But with no letdown to ISIS militancy, those calls have petered out.

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1.6959472Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:07:01Nir Hasson, Aaron Rabinowitz וJack KhouryFri, 22 Feb 2019 13:07:05Hundreds of Palestinians broke into Bab al-Rahma on Friday, a large structure at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem's Old City that has been at the center of reignited tensions in recent days.

The police arrested 60 East Jerusalem residents in their homes on Thursday night on suspicions of incitement and rioting ahead of the Friday prayers at the Temple Mount. The police said additional arrests are possible throughout the day.

Palestinians reported that the arrests were made in the Old City and the nearby neighborhoods of Silwan, Isawiya, A-Tur and Wadi Al-Joz.

>> Why Dome of the Rock was built on the Temple Mount

Palestinian sources told Haaretz that those arrested are mainly young men who regularly attend the prayer services in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. According to the sources, most of the detainees will be released in the next few hours without having to appear in court.

Before the arrests, firebombs were thrown at a security vehicle used to protect Jewish residents of Silwan. The passengers evacuated the vehicle safely before it was set on fire and burned.

Palestinians have tried to start riots in recent days around Bab al-Rahma. Police closed off the structure, which is inside the Golden Gate, in 2003, saying that the Islamic heritage association that operated there had been associated with Hamas.

The Waqf, the Islamic body that manages the Temple Mount compound, wants the area reopened, arguing that the heritage association has long since been disbanded, after its members were arrested. Police in Jerusalem oppose reopening the site.

Last week, the Jordanian government expanded the number of members in the Waqf in the hopes of thwarting Israeli efforts to change the delicate status quo at the holy site, according to sources at the religious trust.

For decades there have been 11 members of the Waqf, which oversees the day-to-day management of the compound and operates separately from the religious leadership of the mosques on the mount, located in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The trust is controlled by the Jordanian government, which has been careful over the years to staff it with people affiliated with the Hashemite monarchy. But last week the government in Amman announced that it would be expanding the Waqf council to 18, and will add for the first time representatives of the Palestinian Authority and local Muslim leaders.

The extraordinary move is perceived as part of Jordan’s efforts to close ranks in order to combat any change in the religious and political status of the Temple Mount – which is holy to both Muslims and Jews – especially with respect to allowing the latter to pray there.

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1.6958688Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:05:06Ofer AderetFri, 22 Feb 2019 11:05:08Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki acknowledges that among the Poles there were “individual criminals, as in any nation,” but will not accept any generalizations about Poland’s involvement as a nation and Poles’ involvement as a people in the Nazis’ crimes.

Speaking with Haaretz this week, after the eruption of the current diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland, Morawiecki says he was profoundly hurt by the comments of interim Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who quoted former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir when he said, “The Poles imbibed anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk.”

This sentence, says Morawiecki, is the reason he canceled his participation in the Visegrad Summit, which was scheduled to be held this week in Israel.

“I have no problem with someone mentioning the fact that during the cruel, evil, dehumanizing war there were individual criminals in my nation – obviously there were, just as in every other nation,” says Morawiecki. “But when you use these stereotypes that ‘every Pole suckled anti-Semitism out of their mother’s breast’ it’s nothing short of racism.”

>> Read more: Auschwitz is rewriting Holocaust history, one tweet at a time ■ With Poland, Netanyahu discovers the limits of playing with history ■ Poland's 'Holocaust Law:' The wound is still open

Morawiecki described further his reaction to Katz’s insult. “When I first heard of this it seemed totally unbelievable. Such words could be used by a radical extremist, but not by a foreign minister,” he said, later adding, “I understand that in the course of an electoral campaign some politicians want to make headlines.”

“We also have to cope with some anti-Semitism in Poland, but fortunately it is marginal,” Morawiecki said, citing the recent report of the European Fundamental Rights Agency. “Poland is one of the few countries in the EU where the number of anti-Semitic incidents is decreasing, while in many others we are witnessing worrying developments,” he said, noting that anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise in countries like France, Germany, Sweden and Britain.

“Let me stress it again: This plague is marginal in Poland. It saddens me that anti-Polonism seems to be the position of one of the top Israeli officials,” said the Polish prime minister.

Morawiecki also cited that the joint statement he signed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last June included a section denouncing anti-Semitism and anti-Polonism. This part of the declaration elicited criticism from some historians who argued that a parallel should not be drawn between the two, and that putting them together in this way diminished the gravity of centuries of anti-Semitism in Poland.

However, the Polish prime minister says he stands firmly by the statement. "Our nations deserve better. Only the enemies of good Polish-Israeli relations are interested in sowing seeds of hatred between our people.”

Katz’s comments were preceded by a comment from Netanyahu that ignited the present crisis. Last Thursday, responding to a question from Haaretz about the new Polish law against accusing Poles of involvement in Nazi crimes, Netanyahu said, “Poles collaborated with the Nazis and I don’t know anyone who was ever sued for such a statement.”

Netanyahu was initially quoted on the Jerusalem Post website as having said that “the Polish nation” colluded with the Nazis. Following a request for clarification from the Polish government, his office issued a statement that “He was speaking about Poles and not about the Polish people or the country of Poland.”

Morawiecki says he spoke with Netanyahu after he made those comments, and that Netanyahu told him that “his words were misinterpreted by journalists. He also confirmed that he stands by our June declaration that said: ‘We reject actions that aim to blame Poland or the Polish nation as a whole for the crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators from other nations.’”

Despite being pleased by Netanyahu’s explanation, Morawiecki says the delay in Israeli response “was not well-received in Poland.” He also implied some unhappiness with the speed and nature of the clarification, which was issued solely as a brief statement in English: “I can only say that if someone ever misquoted my own words, I would take all effort to clarify it.”

Morawiecki again presents the Polish narrative that his nationalist right-wing government has purveyed since coming to power in 2015, a narrative that stresses how Poland itself was a victim of the Nazis and highlights the efforts of Poles to aid their Jewish neighbors.

“Collaboration with Germany was never an official position of the Polish State. The wartime Underground Polish State persecuted all those who were denouncing Jews, sentenced them to death and executed them, even during the war,” he says.

“Occupied Poland was one of the very few states without a puppet Nazi government. And the only one in which a person helping Jews faced death penalty at the hands of the Germans. And not only this person – their entire families as well,” Morawiecki says.

“It was a brave act to do so. Still, tens of thousands of Poles, perhaps even more, were helping their Jewish brethren.” 6,800 Poles have been recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” but the number of Poles who saved Jews is thought to be higher, because many were afraid to tell of their acts of bravery. “We share common history. Our nations were both victims of Nazi Germany. We should not allow some radicals to rewrite history and destroy the memory of that,” says Morawiecki.

“I believe that we still need to educate people across the world, especially younger generations. Of all aspects of history. Of heroes and criminals alike. And about who was responsible for orchestrating these crimes,” the Polish prime minister adds.

Historians are divided about this narrative, which was at the heart of the criticism issued by a number of top Holocaust scholars from Yad Vashem last summer in wake of the joint declaration. These scholars, Professor Havi Dreifuss among them, believe the Polish government is deliberately downplaying the Polish role in Nazi crimes and disproportionately emphasizing the actions by some Poles to help Jews during the Holocaust.

Morawiecki refuses to accept such charges. “Poland is no longer afraid. We experienced terrible war and decades of occupation, and we were not able to defend ourselves from accusations. But now Poland will no longer give in to a pressure to accept lies, misleading phrases, let alone racist insults,” he says. “We are open to truth, even the most difficult truth about individual collaborators – but we will never agree to stretch their personal responsibility to the whole nation.”

He also cites the words of Marie Skłodowska Curie, the Polish Nobel-winning scientist and first woman to be awarded the prize, who said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Asked to comment on the current crisis between the two countries, Morawiecki said: “I don’t think there is a deep crisis between Poland and Israel. I understand that in the course of an electoral campaign some politicians want to make headlines. But in general, my government is one of the most pro-Israeli in the EU and in the United Nations. We openly criticized the BDS initiatives (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) aimed against Israel. The V4 summit in Jerusalem was supposed to become yet another step in building friendship between us and Israel – it was to be actually the first V4 summit ever to be held outside of our region.”

Morawiecki says he hopes that in the future Israeli politicians “will know how to react, and I hope that we can soon return to uninterrupted, fruitful cooperation.”

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1.6959425Fri, 22 Feb 2019 10:20:37The Associated PressFri, 22 Feb 2019 10:15:52A federal judge in California ruled Thursday that a twin son of a gay married couple has been an American citizen since birth, handing a defeat to the U.S. government, which had only granted the status to his brother.

The State Department was wrong to deny citizenship to 2-year-old Ethan Dvash-Banks because U.S. law does not require a child to show a biological relationship with their parents if their parents were married at the time of their birth, District Judge John F. Walter found.

A lawsuit filed by the boys' parents, Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks, sought the same rights for Ethan that his brother, Aiden, has as a citizen.

Each boy was conceived with donor eggs and the sperm from a different father — one an American, the other an Israeli citizen — but born by the same surrogate mother minutes apart.

>> Read more: Israeli opposition to surrogacy is homophobia disguised as concern for the weak

The government had only granted citizenship to Aiden, who DNA tests showed was the biological son of Andrew, a U.S. citizen. Ethan was conceived from the sperm of Elad Dvash-Banks, an Israeli citizen.

The suit was one of two filed last year by an LGBTQ immigrant rights group that said the State Department is discriminating against same-sex binational couples by denying their children citizenship at birth. The cases filed in Los Angeles and Washington by Immigration Equality said the children of a U.S. citizen who marries abroad are entitled to U.S. citizenship at birth no matter where they are born, even if the other parent is a foreigner. Only the Los Angeles case was decided Thursday.

The State Department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the ruling. Previously the department pointed to guidance on its website that said there must be a biological connection to a U.S. citizen to become a citizen at birth.

"This family was shocked and appalled and angry when they were told their family wasn't legal," said Aaron Morris, executive director of Immigration Equality. "They wanted their twin boys to be treated exactly the same."

Morris said the government wrongly applied a policy for children born out of wedlock to married same-sex couples.

Walter agreed, writing that the State Department statute does not contain language "requiring a 'blood relationship between the person and the father' in order for citizenship to be acquired at birth."

"This is justice! We are hopeful that no other family will ever have to go through this again. It's like a giant rock has been removed from our hearts," Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks said in a statement provided by Immigration Equality.

Andrew Dvash-Banks was studying in Israel when he met his future husband, Elad, an Israeli citizen. Because they couldn't marry at the time in the U.S. or in Israel, they moved to Canada, where they wed in 2010. The children were born by a surrogate in September 2016.

Everything seemed fine until the couple brought their cranky infants to the American consulate in Toronto a few months later to apply for citizenship and the woman at the counter began asking probing questions they found shocking and humiliating.

The consular official told them she had discretion to require a DNA test to show who the biological father was of each boy and without those tests neither son would get citizenship. The men knew that Andrew was Aiden's biological father and Elad was Ethan's but they had kept it a secret and hadn't planned on telling anyone.

After submitting the DNA test results that proved who fathered each boy, the couple received a large and small envelope from the U.S. on March 2. The big one included Aiden's passport. The other was a letter notifying Andrew that Ethan's application had been denied.

The family has since moved to Los Angeles to be closer to Andrew Dvash-Banks' family.

The other case involves two women, one from the U.S., and one from Italy, who met in New York, wed in London and each gave birth to a son. The State Department didn't recognize the couple's marriage, the lawsuit said, and only granted citizenship to the boy whose biological mother was born and raised in the U.S.

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1.6958282Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:55:13David Schraub Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:55:16Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set off a political earthquake Thursday when he successfully brokered a merger between the far-right Jewish Home party and the extremist neo-Kahane Otzma Yehudit ("Jewish Power") party. The newly merged electoral list was promised two ministries in a Netanyahu government (reportedly housing and education), as well as the 28th slot on Likud’s own list.

Jewish Home certainly is no stranger to extremism: Bezalel Smotrich, who stepped into the party leadership role when Naftali Bennett and Ayalet Shaked left to form their own "New Right" splinter party, is a self-described "proud homophobe" who infamously called for segregated Jewish and Arab maternity wards.

Yet in this coalition they’d actually be the moderates. Otzma Yehudit’s senior leadership is overrun with the most grotesque and unapologetic strands of racism in Israeli life today.

Benzi Gopstein runs Lehava, which aggressively protests (up to the point of incitement to racism, violence and terrorism) any and all relationships between Jews and non-Jews.

Itamar Ben-Gvir has a picture of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living room.

Former MK Michael Ben-Ari was actually banned from the U.S. for being a member of a terrorist group. All are disciples of the late Meir Kahane, whose Kach Party remains the only party ever banned from Israeli politics for incitement to racism.

Barak Ravid accordingly described Bibi’s efforts on Otzma Yehudit’s behalf as the political equivalent of "a U.S. president cutting a political deal with David Duke."

It’s a fair comparison. But in 1985, Hyman Bookbinder of the American Jewish Committee might have found an even better one.

That was the year that Bookbinder compared Kahane to none other than Louis Farrakhan. Both, he said, were "cancers on the body politic." Both, he said, must be absolutely and unequivocally disavowed by the members of their respective communities.

The connection is actually more than just rhetorical: Kahane was quite open about drawing inspiration from extreme elements of the Black Power movement in laying the foundation for his own version of extremist Jewish politics. The Kahanist blend of inflammatory racism and vicious homophobia, wrapped in a cowl of "traditional" religious conservatism and group self-empowerment, certainly finds ample reflection in the sermons of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

But needless to say, the parallel between Louis Farrakhan and the neo-Kahanists in Otzma Yehudit presents an especially fraught image for the American Jewish community. For some of the markers we laid down are now being called - and it’s fair to wonder if we’re willing to pay what is due.

The Jewish community, including myself in this - has not been shy, after all, in declaring what one’s obligations are when a Louis Farrakhan is in your orbit.

Denunciation must be immediate and unqualified. There is no space for equivocation and, more importantly, no room even for association. These were the strikes against Tamika Mallory and Marc Lamont Hill, for example - while neither specifically endorsed Farrakhan’s viciously anti-Semitic screeds, both continued to promote and praise him, and help pave the way for his continued influence. As abetters of Farrakhan’s power, they too could be held to account for his bigotry.

We have been very brash and very confident in saying that if a Louis Farrakhan emerged in our community, we would behave differently.

Of course we’d disavow him, without hesitation and compunction. We would not weasel around, we wouldn’t try to cut fine distinctions between disliking the racism but needing to be "where our people are." We would not tolerate a Farrakhan, and we would not tolerate those in our community who gave succor to a Farrakhan. Farrakhan-like figures, we insisted, do not present hard choices.

Well, good news! Now’s our chance to show how easy this all is. Netanyahu and the Israeli government are to the neo-Kahanists in Otzma Yehudit as Tamika Mallory and the Women’s March is to Louis Farrakhan. This is our moment. Time to put up or shut up.

Are you hesitating? Are you tempted to say, "Yes, Jewish Power is a racist party, but politics is a dirty business and people make ugly compromises all the time”? That sounds awfully like "going wherever our people are."

Are you willing to call Jewish Power racist, but make excuses for Bibi and Likud for associating with them? Then you’re no different from the Women’s March apologists, who also tried to disavow Farrakhan’s own bigotry while disclaiming any culpability for those who promoted him.

Are you casting about for a spurious distinction to seize upon - Bibi never called Kahane "the greatest of all time!" - and deciding it’s all apples-to-oranges? Well it’s true that Bibi never called Kahane "the greatest of all time," but Mallory didn’t work feverishly to get Farrakhan two cabinet postings and a seat in Congress - so call it a wash.

It’s not that politics, and intracommunity relationships, aren’t a messy businesses. They are - for the Jewish community, and for the Black community. The degree to which we demand context and complexity in one should be the precise degree that we tolerate it in the other.

And while it’s fine to observe that there is something wrong with the left if it’s "hard" for it to extricate itself from a naked bigot like Farrakhan, we must then be equally open about what it says about our Jewish and Zionist community to the extent we find ourselves impossibly entangled with the hateful extremists in Jewish Power.

For me, though, I find it no struggle at all to condemn both Otzma Yehudit's vicious racism and Netanyahu and Likud for legitimizing and promoting it. And to be clear, I don’t want to suggest that all in the Jewish community are failing this test. Some are, indeed, "putting up."

Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL declared that there "should be no room for racism & no accommodation for intolerance in Israel or any democracy," specifically making note of the "hate-filled rhetoric" of Jewish Power party leaders Netanyahu was legitimizing. Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union of Reform Judaism said it was "morally outrageous" for Netanyahu to try to "bolster" himself politically by promoting naked racism. J Street released a lengthy statement lambasting Netanyahu and Likud for "openly mak[ing] common cause with proponents of ethnic cleansing and right-wing terror."

But too many of us are still in denial about what has long been before our eyes: Netanyahu’s political power is built upon racist foundations - if not by his own direct hand (though his notable racist appeals against Arabs "voting in droves" certainly suffices to render him directly culpable), then certainly in the politicians and parties he has helped empower.

Unfortunately, even in the face of the once-unthinkable step of legitimizing and aligning with neo-Kahanists, the list of Jewish organizations who have kept quiet is much larger than those who have spoken up.

And what of the venerable American Jewish Committee? At the time this column was published, their initial response was: no comment. It was a far fall for the organization's principled posture 30 years ago, insisting on the moral equivalence of Farrakhan and Kahane and the moral imperative to let neither’s bigotry go unchallenged. After publication, the AJC did manage to call Jewish Power "reprehensible" in a statement that seemed primarily concerned with shunting responsibility for its presence or absence in the Knesset onto the Central Elections Commission. Is it a step forward? Yes, and I'm glad the AJC belatedly spoke out. But their clear reticence in doing so still stands in stark contrast to the immediate and unqualified condemnation we've claimed to expect out of those who associate with Farrakhan. This op-ed was updated to reflect the fact that, after publication, the AJC released a statement on Jewish Power.

David Schraub is a lecturer in law and senior research fellow at the California Constitution Center, UC Berkeley School of Law. He blogs regularly at The Debate Link. Twitter: @schraubd

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1.6959381Fri, 22 Feb 2019 09:10:44Haaretz Sports StaffFri, 22 Feb 2019 09:02:51Atletico Niv, AJAF and Ra’anana remain in lockstep at the top of the International Football League of Israel standings, as victories by all three teams last weekend means that only two points separate first place and third place.

Atletico Niv had no problems in a 12-0 demolition of FC United Tel Aviv. Kobi Aslan led all scorers with four goals, followed by Omri Azran with three, Kfir Stokol with a brace and Yarden Swissa, Inon Malchi and Bar Vahaba with one goal each. Swissa added four assists, while Vahaba notched three assists.

A flurry of five second-half goals broke open a close match for Ra’anana, which downed Ramat Gan 7-3. Michelle Orellano had a hat trick, while Barak Maimoni, Ran Pardess, Chen Kimhi and Dean Itzhak each netted a goal for the winners.

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1.6959348Fri, 22 Feb 2019 08:47:25Haaretz Sports StaffFri, 22 Feb 2019 08:46:23Givat Washington may not be in the running to win Israel Netball’s regular season title, but that didn’t stop the team from giving league-leading Tel Aviv a run for its money last Thursday.

Tel Aviv might have seemed vulnerable, having dropped its first game of the season just before the midseason break, and had to work hard to avoid a second straight defeat.

Playing its first match since drawing with Ra’anana last month, Givat Washington was tied with Tel Aviv at the end of the first period and was down only one point, at 36-35, going into the final quarter. But Tel Aviv pulled away to win 54-46, giving the team a 6-1 record with 32 points. The loss left Givat Washington tied with Jtown in fourth place with a 2-3-1 record and 18 points.

In the league’s other match on Thursday, Jerusalem Mercaz blew away Modi’in 61-24. Mercaz’s 61-point night was the highest so far this season and the most since Tel Aviv scored 66 points in December 2017.

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1.6959132Fri, 22 Feb 2019 06:34:34Aluf BennThu, 21 Feb 2019 22:23:46Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States raised an interesting question about Israeli politics. Could someone here also emerge from outside the political system, shake up the game and win power? Benny Gantz proved that such a leap might be possible – at least as far as the threshold of the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Now, he has two-and-a-half months to see if he really can evict the current residents.

Gantz didn’t appear out of nowhere; he was chief of staff, his name and face were familiar. But his political aspirations were vague. He didn’t do anything of value that resonated with the public since he came out of the army. His record in uniform isn’t being taught in military history lessons. It was hard to compare him to the war hero Ariel Sharon or to the decorated soldier Ehud Barak, who were marked as candidates for state leadership many years before they got there.

Gantz’s secret was accurately reading the current sentiment among his potential supporters’ camp. These people were sick of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule and were frustrated by the weakness of his political rivals, Yair Lapid and Avi Gabbay, who were seen as inexperienced and lacking gravitas in matters of statesmanship and security.

>> Read more: Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain’t seen nothing yet ■ Israel's Blue and White Boys Club wants your vote ■ Gantz and Lapid's new party has a single ideology: To replace Netanyahu

Gantz provides his voters an answer with his rank, his military experience and his caution when it comes to controversial moves and statements. The British military historian and theorist Liddell Hart called it “the line of least resistance” on the way to the goal. Gantz lulled his rivals in the center and left to sleep, until they found themselves harnessed to his cart.

Gantz has also proved politically adept at forming a ticket centered on the connection with Lapid and enlisting Gabi Ashkenazi. His test now will be in honing the message and enforcing discipline among this band on the way to the polls, under attacks from the right and Netanyahu’s desperate moves, which will only intensify when the attorney general makes the announcement of the expected indictment against the prime minister.

The confrontation in the elections is clear. Gantz represents the old Israel, the great society that solves problems by increasing the state budget, Avi Nissenkorn’s Histadrut and the double careers of active-duty soldiers. He stands for the wars and bombings and targeted assassinations he highlights in his films and speeches. In fact, it’s Ben Gurion’s dream, played to Naomi Shemer’s melodies.

Opposite him stands Netanyahu, the anarchist and pacifist who abhors big government, trade unions and wars, who even after a decade in power pretends to represent a coalition of those who consider themselves oppressed and to refer to the state’s institutions, the army and justice system as “them.”

Can Gantz win? Motivation and political capability are leaning in his favor, but the election is determined in the president’s residence, and the way there is tortuous. Behind Netanyahu stands a camp united in its ideology – keeping the territories and open hatred of Arabs. Gantz needs the support of a bloc beginning with Moshe Ya’alon and Yoaz Hendel and continues all the way to Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh. There’s no agreement in this bloc about anything, except replacing Netanyahu. And it has parties in danger of extinction, Labor and Meretz who weren’t wise enough to unite.

Gantz needs to hope Moshe Kahlon and Orly Levi-Abekasis don’t make it into the Knesset, that the left wing parties are saved and most important – that the indictment and Netanyahu’s tricks drive moderate right-wing voters into Kahol Lavan’s arms – or simply keep them at home on April 9. Not easy, but not impossible, as Donald Trump has shown.

David Friedman, who was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, was speaking in Jerusalem at a forum to encourage business links between Israeli settlements and Palestinians.

“There are many, many Palestinians that would like to be freed up to engage in business ventures with Israelis, and they’re entitled to that opportunity,” Friedman told Reuters at the two-day forum attended by Israeli government officials, international businessmen and a handful of Palestinians.

Friedman’s remarks were immediately attacked by Palestinian officials as encouraging settlement activity in the West Bank.

“This constitutes a stab in the back of the Palestinian people,” said Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the PLO’s executive committee.

>> Palestinians have no confidence in the Palestinian president | Opinion

“We warn against any involvement or participation of any Palestinian in projects with settlers, or meetings called by the American ambassador.”

Most of the world considers the settlements illegal under international law, a position Israel rejects. U.S. criticism of Israeli settlement building has died down since Trump took office.

Many Palestinians view engagement with the settlements as “normalization,” arguing that doing business with Israelis in the West Bank legitimizes their presence and hinders future Palestinian sovereignty.

However, thousands of Palestinians work in settlements, often in manufacturing or construction jobs which they say offer higher wages than similar jobs in Palestinian cities.

Haldun al-Husseini, a Palestinian garment manufacturer from Jerusalem who attended the forum, says business with Israelis is key to improving the Palestinian economy, where unemployment stands at 32%.

“Most of my business comes from Israelis,” Husseini said. “If we don’t work together, we will not improve Palestinian lives.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas severed all political contacts with the White House after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017 and opened a U.S. embassy in the city in May.

Those decisions delighted Israel, which claims all of Jerusalem, including the eastern sector captured in 1967, as its capital. But the moves dismayed Palestinians who see east Jerusalem as their capital.

Earlier this week, it was revealed the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem, which serves Palestinians, will be absorbed into the new embassy in March, creating a single diplomatic mission for both parties.

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1.6959295Fri, 22 Feb 2019 05:03:27TheMarkerFri, 22 Feb 2019 04:23:31In the country’s second $560 million exit in just three days, Israeli software services provider Attunity said Thursday it was being acquired by U.S. data analytics firm Qlik in an all-cash deal.

The U.S. company Palo Alto Networks said Tuesday it was paying $560 million for the Israel cybersecurity startup Demisto. The same day, Google Cloud announced it was buying Israel’s Alooma for an undisclosed sum that sources estimated was $150 million.

Shareholders of Attunity will receive $23.50 in cash per share, representing a premium of 18% to Attunity’s closing price the day before. The U.S.-Israeli company’s Nasdaq-traded shares closed the gap, climbing 17.9% to $23.49 at late morning local time in New York.

“Attunity’s strength in real-time data delivery across complex cloud environments will uniquely position Qlik to help customers lead with data and align their enterprise analytics strategy,” said Qlik CEO Mike Capone. “Attunity has demonstrated strong growth in a large market and together we’re better positioned to serve our enterprise customers along with our partner ecosystem to solve the most challenging data problems.”

The biggest gainer from the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter, is Attunity’s Israeli CEO Shimon Alon, who owns 6.44% of the company, worth $33 million. The other major shareholders are all U.S. institutional investors, although Israel’s Yellin Lapidot holds an 0.84% stake worth $4.2 million.

Financing for the deal is being provided by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the companies said. Qlik, which went public in 2010, was bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo for about $3 billion in 2016.

Founded in 1988, Attunity is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts but has a research and development center in Tel Aviv. Its shares rose 185% in the 12 months through Wednesday, for a market cap of $413 million. In the fourth quarter it posted $2.7 million net profit on revenue of $26 million, turning around from a year-earlier loss of $1.6 million on sales of $18 million.

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1.6958923Fri, 22 Feb 2019 03:57:34Asaf RonelFri, 22 Feb 2019 03:57:36Early Friday morning at 3:45 A.M. Israel time marked the beginning of a new era for Israeli space research with the launch of the first Israeli spacecraft heading to the moon. The launch set several records: The ship will be the smallest and least expensive spacecraft ever to land on the moon and will put Israel among the ranks of the superpowers, the United States, Russia and China, which have successfully carried out lunar landings of various kinds.

The unmanned Genesis spacecraft (“Beresheet” in Hebrew), which was privately built by the non-profit group SpaceIL in cooperation with Israel Aeronautics Industries, was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. At a press conference this week, the president of SpaceIL, Morris Kahn, who donated $40 million of the $100 million cost of the spacecraft, said Genesis was presented as a gift to President Reuven Rivlin and declared a national project.

“We have been on this journey for eight years and it will be completed in two months, with the landing on the moon. We are making history and we are proud to be part of a group that has dreamed and realized the dream that many countries have had but only three have fulfilled,” Kahn said.

In addition to the national pride that the project, which is not entirely a private venture, generates, the symbolic importance of Genesis is huge and the launch has sparked global interest. The spacecraft itself is mostly a demonstration of the capabilities that the project has drawn on. Its scientific mission is simple and the plan is for it to stay on the moon for just two days. Up to this point, only China has had the proven technology necessary for a soft landing on the moon.

Israel’s success could lead to a whole host of future lunar landings and create an entirely different business model in which private firms would offer a range of services. Customers would be able to purchase a spot on a spacecraft for their equipment — ranging from scientific instruments and communications technology to clients who want to spread the ashes of their loved ones on the moon. In the longer term, firms could try to reach the moon to produce products, from precious metals to water that could be used to fuel rockets or to actually settle the moon.

SpaceIL’s project began as an initiative of three young people, Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yehonatan Weintraub, who in 2010 registered for Google’s Lunar XPRIZE competition. The competition ended in March of last year without a winner, but SpaceIL announced that it would continue to pursue the plans. With the assistance of private donors and with the support of Israel’s Science, Technology and Space Ministry, the threesome managed to fulfill their dream with Friday's launch.

Thirty-two minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft, which was placed on an Indian communications satellite, the main payload of the launch, separated from the Falcon rocket. Several minutes later, personnel in the project’s control room at Israel Aerospace Industries in Yehud, near Ben-Gurion International Airport, made contact with Genesis.

According to plans, the spacecraft’s lunar landing legs opened and were followed by a series of tests of the spacecraft’s systems to verify that they weathered the launch and are functioning well in space. About an hour after the launch, Genesis entered its first orbit of the Earth.

Genesis' path toward the moon includes elliptical orbits of increasing size around the Earth, during which the spacecraft makes use of the Earth’s gravitational pull to increase its speed. All told, Genesis is scheduled to travel 6.5 million kilometers (4 million miles), making it the lunar mission with the longest path ever traveled.

On its final orbit, the spacecraft is scheduled to approach the moon itself, to be followed by a complex maneuver in which it will attempt to be pulled into the lunar field of gravity — about 10 days before it actually lands on the moon. If everything goes well, it will orbit the moon until the timing is right for a landing, which is currently scheduled for April 11.

“Our journey to the moon is full of challenges, and therefore our mission is immeasurably complex. Every step that we take successfully will pave the way for the success of the next step, until the landing on the moon,” Ido Anteby, SpaceIL’s CEO, said at this week’s news conference.

Lightweight and at a relatively low price tag

Genesis, which weighs just 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds), and whose $100 million price tag compares with billions that have been spent on prior lunar missions, was planned without a backup system in the event of a technical malfunction. The spacecraft is a meter and a half tall and 2 meters wide (nearly 5 feet tall and 6 and a half feet wide). Its maximum planned speed is 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) per second.

It will be carrying equipment to measure the moon’s magnetic field, which astronomers still don’t fully understand. In addition, after the spacecraft lands, it will take a selfie of itself and of the Israeli flag from the lunar surface. Genesis also has a time capsule on board with hundreds of digital files, from details regarding the construction of the spacecraft and the team involved, to national symbols, cultural information and other material collected from members of the public over the years.

One of the motivations leading the various partners in the project to support it is the hope that it will spawn the Israeli equivalent of the Apollo effect in the United States, created in connection with the American program to land a man on the moon, leading up to the actual landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. The Israeli entrepreneurs and their donors hope that a successful Genesis mission will encourage Israeli young people to take an interest in space and science and engineering.

It seems the medical marijuana company InterCure is becoming addicted to brass. In September it named Ehud Barak, the former army chief of staff and prime minster, as its chairman and on Thursday announced the appointment of Maj.Gen. (ret.) Nitzan Alon as CEO of its Canndoc subsidiary. The move comes as Israel’s medical marijuana industry gears up for newly legalized exports. “Alon, 54, has proven management experience of more than 30 years in large and complex systems operating in a dynamic and variable environment with multiple interfaces,” the company said. Alon served as head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate for three years, following stints as head of the army’s Central Command and the elite special operations force Sayeret Matkal. In July he was tapped to head efforts to combat the Iranian threat. InterCure, a health care holding company, bought Canndoc in September. It plans to expand the medical marijuana company’s production twentyfold, to 100 metric tons, over the next 18 months. (Guy Erez)

Shufersal spending heavily to expand its new Be drugstore chain

Shufersal is spending heavily on its newly acquired drugstore chain in a push to place new stores in the best locations and challenge market leader Super Pharm. Israel’s biggest supermarket chain spent 130 million shekels ($36 million) nearly two years ago to buy the ailing New Pharm chain and renamed it Be. Since then Shufersal has discovered that New Pharm’s chief problem was the poor sites of most of its stores and is now prepared to spend top dollar to quickly acquire the best new locations. One industry source expressed skepticism about the strategy, saying that the 250 shekels a square meter it was paying for a site in Tel Aviv’s Gan Ha’ir mall couldn’t be justified financially. “For that store to break even it will need turnover of 1.5 million shekels a month, but the average for a New Pharm store was just 650,000. Even if they increase turnover 30% it won’t be profitable,” he said. (Adi Dovrat-Meseritz and Yoram Gabison)

Playtech shares surge on buyback offer

Playtech shares rallied in London after the Israeli gambling software developer said it would buy back shares worth 40 million euro ($45.34 million) and forecast core earnings to rise at least 15% for 2019. Playtech said it expects 2019 adjusted earnings before income, tax, depreciation and amortization to be between 390 million and 415 million euros. The profit range includes a positive impact from Sun Bingo, which had losses in 2018. The company posted adjusted core earnings of 343 million euros in 2018, 7% higher than a year earlier, boosted by its acquisition of Italian betting and gaming firm Snaitech and growth in regulated markets. The number beat Morgan Stanley’s consensus of 329 million euros. Shares of Playtech, which last month said it would pay 28 million euros under a settlement with Israeli tax authorities following an audit of its accounts, closed up 8.7% at 400 pence. (Reuters)

Wall Street leaves Tel Aviv lower for first time in five sessions

The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange marked its first decline in five sessions Thursday after a weak Wall Street opening pressured shares lower. The TA-35 and TA-125 indexes each ended down 0.53% at 1,569.92 and 1,428.72 points, respectively, on turnover of 1.8 billion shekels ($500 million). B Communications led TA-125 shares down, falling 4.3% to 16.39. Its Bezeq subsidiary dropped a more modest 2.4% to 3.22. Wireless providers were also down sharply, Partner Communications by 3.6% to 16.44 and Cellcom Israel by 3.5% to 16.79. Phoenix led insurance stocks lower, falling 1.65% to 20.81, and Isramco paced losses in energy on a 2.2% drop to 40 agorot. Medical marijuana company Together lost 0.8% to 5.86 after its three co-CEOs sold a combined 160,000 shares at 5.61 shekels each. It was their third share sale in three months. Kerur led TA-125 gainers on a 3.1% rise to 94.78. (Eran Azran)

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1.6958661Fri, 22 Feb 2019 03:21:00Allison Kaplan SommerFri, 22 Feb 2019 03:21:00The events that turned Israeli politics upside down Wednesday night gave new meaning to the phrase “general election.” Literally, it is an election full of generals – or, to be even more precise, former chiefs of staff.

The newborn Blue and White alliance (in Hebrew, Kahol Lavan) was celebrated in a buddy-movie Instagram photo taken after a long night of negotiations. It featured three men who had commanded the Israeli army, Benny Gantz, Moshe Ya’alon and the newest soldier to join the ranks battling to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 9 – Gabi Ashkenazi.

Rounding out the quartet is the sole non-general: Former journalist and television personality Yair Lapid.

>> Read more: Can Gantz pull a Trump? ■ Gantz and Lapid's new party has a single ideology: To replace Netanyahu ■ Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain't seen nothing yet

Noticeably missing in the Insta-snapshot of the new centrist kid on the block: Any sign of a woman in this blue and white landscape. The fact the portrait of these four amigos is the dominant image of Israel’s new political reality is depressingly reflective of the minimal female presence in the highest levels of government.

Male dominance is certainly nothing new in Israeli politics. A combination of springboarding military men into power and religious political players who view female leadership as taboo have always posed a challenge to women in Israeli politics. There are some notable exceptions, of course, like former Prime Minister Golda Meir and Culture Minister Miri Regev (Likud), who made her name as Israel Defense Forces spokesperson and military censor.

In 2019, though, the failure of women to become players at the highest political levels in Israel stands out at a time where so many women are throwing their hats in the ring to be president of the United States and when key Western countries (Great Britain, Germany) are led by women.

The latest developments in the 2019 election campaign seem to have shifted the status of women from not-so-great to pretty darn bad.

First, Tzipi Livni – Israel’s most senior female political presence – was forced to exit the political stage after it became clear she was viewed as political kryptonite by the men at the top of the country’s centrist and center-left parties. After her rude dismissal from Zionist Union by Labor leader Avi Gabbay in January, no other party wanted her. After realizing she had no chance of drawing enough political support to overcome the electoral threshold, she said her goodbyes this week.

Now, Orli Levi-Abekasis and her Gesher party have been snubbed by Gantz in favor of that alliance with Lapid’s Yesh Atid, scuttling what looked like the most promising prospect of anointing a new and young female leader.

And with very little room left at the top, the fairly respectable initial female representation in Gantz and Lapid’s parties has significantly dissipated by virtue of their electoral alliance. The parties’ joint slate has no women in the top six slots. Miki Haimovich is seventh and Orna Barbivai – herself Israel’s first female major general – 10th. Only eight of the slate’s 30 candidates are female.

One advantage of personality-driven parties like Gantz and Lapid’s has been the fact that, unlike parties whose top dogs were determined by primaries, the leaders could design a slate to reflect diverse groups – and presumably attract more voters by promising wider representation.

Lapid pioneered this method when he formed Yesh Atid’s first slate in 2013, bringing in a mix of fresh and diverse female faces. He has remained conscious of those optics, with a final count of four women in his top 10 (with Barbivai the highest ranked). Gantz’s list has been significantly less impressive than Lapid’s, with one woman – former news anchor Haimovich – in the fourth slot and two more squeezed in at ninth and 10th.

As for the other parties, the Likud primary left the top of its slate fairly bereft of women: Two female ministers, Regev and Gila Gamliel, are numbers 6 and 10, respectively, with only one other woman, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely, placed in the top 20 (16th).

Labor and Meretz, two parties where women hold solid leadership roles (the latter led by Tamar Zandberg), are expected to suffer in this new political landscape where the prospect of ending the Netanyahu era is likely to cause left-wing voters to swing toward Gantz and Lapid.

While no polls have been done since the Kahol Lavan alliance was born, both Meretz and Gesher – the only two parties with women at the helm – were not polling in high numbers and are in real danger of disappearing off the political map.

In the new landscape, the unlikely prize for respectable female representation goes to the newly formed right-wing party Hayamin Hehadash. Not only is the party led by a male-female partnership (Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked), but Shaked’s name comes first on its logo.

Bennett and Shaked’s Hayamin Hehadash is the only party with a female majority at the top: four of the six candidates heading the list are women, including political newcomers Alona Barkat, the owner of Hapoel Be’er Sheva soccer club, and hawkish journalist Caroline Glick.

Even a female-friendly left-wing party like Labor couldn’t resist the power of the generals. After MKs Stav Shaffir, Shelly Yacimovich and Merav Michaeli triumphed in the party primary earlier this month and finished high on the slate, party leader Avi Gabbay pushed all three down a slot on Wednesday when, with much fanfare, he unveiled his new acquisition: Tal Russo – a former IDF general, naturally.

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1.6959267Fri, 22 Feb 2019 03:04:16Ronny Linder-Ganz וAvi Waksman Fri, 22 Feb 2019 02:47:16Israeli taxes on rolled tobacco and cigarettes were equalized as of Thursday after Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon signed an order he long resisted as part of his anti-tax policy.

The parity order was issued two weeks after the High Court of Justice mandated it, saying that both kinds of tobacco presented equal health problems and should thus receive the same tax treatment.

The tax on a 50-gram package of rolled tobacco goes up to 55 shekels ($15.20) from 23 shekels previously. Taking into account the value-added tax, that means the shelf price will increase to 122.85 shekels from 85.41 as of Thursday.

The gap in tobacco taxes, and as a result retail prices, emerged in 2013 after the government raised taxes on cigarette prices. The result was a huge increase in sales of rolled tobacco as smokers, especially young ones, opted for the lower-price alterative. The market share for rolled tobacco soared from just 1.1% of all tobacco sales in 2012 to 17.8% today.

Smoking experts say that taxes are a key way to deter smokers and that is why Israel imposes such a high rate on tobacco. But Kahlon, who led his Kulanu Party to a strong showing in the 2015 elections on a consumer-friendly policy, has been cutting income tax and other taxes and didn’t want to be associated with any kind of rise, even for tobacco.

The consumer advocacy group Smoke Free Israel petitioned the High Court last June and was later joined by the Israel Cancer Society and Israel Medical Association with amicus briefs. Although Kahlon continued to oppose the tax hike, he failed to convince government attorneys, who told the court last month they wouldn’t oppose the petition.

Judge Dafna Barak-Erez said in her ruling that Kahlon’s refusal to sign the order because it contradicted his tax policy didn’t exempt the government from its obligation to impose consistent policies or to take into account the impact it had on the right to health.

The higher tax on rolled tobacco is expected to yield the treasury an extra 400 million to 450 million shekels a year.

In a related development, Kahlon also signed an ordered delaying a hike in the excise tax on coal paid by the Israel Electric Corporation until 2021. The increase had been slated to go into effect March 15. By putting it off Kahlon is enabling state-owned IEC to avoid a politically unpopular increase in electricity rates.

Kahlon took a lot of flak when news emerged in December that electricity prices would be rising 7.3%. Delaying the higher excise tax on coal enabled Kahlon to limit the rise to just 2.9%, which took effect January 1.

Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit is expected to announce his decision regarding an indictment before the election. Coalition chief David Amsalem has already warned of “a coup taking place in Israel,” urging followers to “assume the police and state prosecutors depose Netanyahu” and asserting “people won’t accept whoever is elected.”

With the police, the State Prosecutor’s Office and the media perceived as being in collusion with “the left” against Netanyahu, the prime minister needs soldiers of his own in order to oppose the IDF party, headed by three former chiefs of staff. Having portrayed the army as joining the center-left camp, Netanyahu has no choice but to recruit the hilltop rabble as his own true army.

Journalist and convicted terrorist Hagai Segal was the first one to volunteer for the recruitment mission. There’s a time for terrorism and a time for editing a newspaper. His paper Makor Rishon has been using his columns for this purpose for weeks.

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Netanyahu would not have succeeded to attain his goals without the persuasive efforts of Segal who, week after week, with the zeal of a true believer and the patience of a settler, anointed his electorate with a moral lubricant, ahead of the union between the extreme right-wing elements.

“We need to close ranks in facing the enemy” he wrote. “If Benny Begin ran with Gandhi [Rehavam Ze’evi] in ’99, after he’d already called him ‘political scum,’ Bezalel Smotrich can run for a Knesset seat together with [Kahanist activist] Itamar Ben-Gvir. If Benny Gantz and Ayman Odeh are forming a bloc to stop Netanyahu, Rabbi Rafi Peretz [Habayit Hayehudi] and [Otzma party and Kahanist activist] Michael Ben-Ari can run together.”

Segal wrote in another column that “the wasting of even one Knesset seat can cost the ‘Land of Israel faithful’ dearly.”

He reiterated that Otzma is a vociferous party that thrives on fighting the left, but that the electoral threshold is an existential threat to the enterprise Smotrich represents in the Knesset. “When there is doubt [regarding getting in], there is no doubt [regarding a union].”

Just like during the Oslo Accords era, Netanyahu has loosened all restraints, recruiting the same forces, needing the same energy in the streets. He wants the right to look at Mendelblit’s signature on the indictment and see Rabin’s signature on the Oslo Accords, to look at the center-left camp and see Hamas.

Netanyahu is readying himself for the battle of his life. He’s sprayed the fuel of hatred and incitement in all directions and recruited the extreme of the extreme – admirers of Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir and the people who burn Arab babies – who are now waiting for Mendelblit to light the match. Netanyahu’s campaign is waiting for Mendelblit. He’s counting on Mendelblit.

His allies from 1995 are with him. Last week, Segal was interviewed by Kalman Liebskind and Erel Segal, after Makor Rishon decided to remove comments from its website, in order to “make our small contribution to cleansing the public sphere of the soot of hatred and incitement,” as he called it.

Liebskind and Segal challenged him with a theory that says that online comments may serve as an outlet for political aggression, thereby reducing physical aggression. Liebskind noted that there was a suggestion that if social media had been around in 1995 Yigal Amir may have made do with writing a post on Facebook.

If it were not for the fact that the editor of Makor Rishon was a member of the Jewish underground, who was convicted of causing grave injuries and of membership in a terrorist organization, and is now the architect of a union between Habayit Hayehudi and Kahanists, one could ignore the chilling logical conclusion that arises when linking the decision by Makor Rishon to Liebskind’s suggestion.

Is it possible that Segal is actually interested in releasing the political violence of the extreme right, which lies trapped in social media?

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1.6959250Fri, 22 Feb 2019 02:04:48Haaretz EditorialFri, 22 Feb 2019 01:23:48Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid have done an admirable thing. The respective leaders of Hosen L’Yisrael and Yesh Atid have shown political maturity in setting aside their egos and opting to run together for the premiership.

The national responsibility they have accepted, along with the important addition of former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, means that, for the first time in a decade, an Israeli election offers an opposition team with a real chance of winning.

The best evidence of the alliance’s effectiveness – apart from the polls that indicated on Thursday that the new party has surged ahead of Netanyahu – is the panic with which it was received by the right. Benjamin Netanyahu, as expected, didn’t deviate from his standard formula – a mixture of intimidation and incitement. He said in his hysterical speech on Thursday that Gantz and Lapid “are relying on a blocking majority [with the help] of Arab parties acting to destroy Israel.”

It is regrettable that the Labor and Meretz parties haven’t succeeded in displaying a similar extent of responsibility. Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg blamed Labor leader Avi Gabbay for the failure. “We did everything we could to unite and create a significant force in the left opposite the joinder of the Likud and the Kahanists. Gabbay refused,” she said. Gabbay’s excuse was attributing his refusal to public opinion polls. It is to be hoped that this wretched decision doesn’t bring an end to one of the left-wing parties.

Indeed, the polls have shown some recovery in support for Labor since its primary, but public backing for both Labor and Meretz has reached a low point in recent weeks, including polls conducted on Thursday evening.

The hope of a political upheaval is expected to draw numerous leftist voters to support Gantz and Lapid’s new party, Kahol Lavan, which could lead either Labor or Meretz to fail to make it into the Knesset. This could cost the leftist bloc numerous Knesset seats.

The mission facing Gantz, Lapid, Ashkenazi and Moshe Ya’alon, the new slate’s number three, must now focus on drawing votes from the right-wing bloc, rather than expanding at the expense of Labor and Meretz.

Netanyahu is proving every day that there is no red line he won’t cross in the struggle for his political survival. One should hope the new alternative finally puts an end to the political recklessness of the suspect from Balfour Street.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

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1.6959216Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:27:59Amir TibonFri, 22 Feb 2019 00:13:08WASHINGTON – The American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the oldest Jewish organizations in the United States, released a statement on Thursday denouncing the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, an extremist party that includes followers of the racist late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

On Wednesday, Haaretz published a story on reactions within the American Jewish community to Prime Minsiter Netanyahu’s efforts to bring Otzma Yehudit into the Knesset. While a number of leading Jewish groups, such as the Anti Defamation League and the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced those efforts, AJC originally said that it won’t comment on the matter because it has to do with internal Israeli politics.

The AJC is a Jewish advocacy group that has existed for more than 100 years, and is considered one of the most influential organizations in the Jewish community. It is usually very supportive of Israel and its policies.

On Thursday, however, the organization changed course and put out a strong statement against Otzma Yehudit, noting that the group is affiliated with the racist, extremist rabbi Meir Kahane. While AJC’s statement denounced Otzma Yehudit, it didn’t directly mention Netanyahu.

>> Netanyahu now endorses Jewish fascism. U.S. Jews, cut your ties with him now | Opinion

“American Jewish Committee (AJC) does not normally comment on political parties and candidates during an election. But with the announcement that Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), a new political party formed by longtime followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, is now seeking election to the Knesset, we feel compelled to speak out," the statement reads.

The AJC text goes on to describe the party's creed as in contradiction with Israel's core values. "The views of Otzma Yehudit are reprehensible. They do not reflect the core values that are the very foundation of the State of Israel. The party might conceivably gain enough votes to enter the next Knesset, and potentially even become part of the governing coalition.

Historically, the views of extremist parties, reflecting the extreme left or the extreme right, have been firmly rejected by mainstream parties, even if the electoral process of Israel’s robust democracy has enabled their presence, however small, in the Knesset,” it concludes.

The organization also stated that “ultimately, it is up to Israel’s Central Elections Commission to determine, as it has done in the past, whether Otzma Yehudit can be listed on the ballot on Election Day. Looking ahead to April 9, AJC reaffirms our commitment to Israel’s democratic and Jewish character, which we hope will be the ultimate winners in every election cycle.”

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1.6959016Thu, 21 Feb 2019 23:54:23Amos HarelThu, 21 Feb 2019 23:52:05In early 2011, a few days before Benny Gantz confounded expectations by being appointed Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, someone wrote that the general was someone who could win the lottery even if he forgot to send in the form that week. Sure enough, the major general who was previously tapped for the post, Yoav Gallant, got embroiled in a property affair and his appointment was canceled at the last minute.

Good fortune – a quality that Napoleon reportedly demanded of his generals – now accompanies the former chief of staff in his political life. The question on everyone’s lips at General Staff headquarters this week was: Is this our Benny?

Gantz is usually berated for not being decisive enough and not forging a path of his own. But the propitious moment at which he entered politics – after his maiden speech, not enough time has passed for his standing to be eroded – helped him force an alliance on Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid before dawn on Thursday.

It’s doubtful whether Lapid, and still less Gantz’s former commanders in the chiefs-of-staff club, Moshe Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi, are convinced that Gantz is better suited then they to head the joint military slate. But the timing and the polls played their part. Suddenly an opportunity emerged to begin to entertain the possibility of beating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the April 9 election. And all this happened without Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit deciding yet whether to indict Netanyahu on bribery charges.

For years it has been claimed that Israeli elections are decided largely by one issue, security, and most voters’ belief that right-wingers, especially Netanyahu, are more qualified to cope with the multiple military threats. This time, though, it looks like the election will revolve largely around another issue: sympathy or loathing for Netanyahu. Likud, as its campaign against Gantz shows, aims to make fear the thing and stoke anxiety that the rival party will return land to the Palestinians and thrust Israel back to the days of the suicide bombers.

In practice, the negotiating process has been frozen for many years. The only prospect of renewing it is linked to the U.S. peace initiative, the “deal of the century” that the Trump administration could present after the election. Under those circumstances, even Netanyahu might have a hard time refusing the American president. Indeed, the prevailing view is that if a right-wing victory and a U.S. peace proposal come to pass, Netanyahu won’t hesitate to veer leftward and co-opt Gantz & Co. into the government, abandoning his old friends on the right.

One-man show

The 2019 election is a campaign to save Netanyahu – first from political defeat and, more importantly for him, from the threat of indictments and prison. In this situation all means are justified, as Netanyahu has been signaling for months. The prime minister will take no prisoners. The threat of the Gantz-Lapid union lies in the three retired generals in the ticket’s top four spots. It was a lot easier to tag Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni as the soft and treasonous left in the 2015 election (though that didn’t stop Netanyahu from trying to co-opt them into his government a year later).

Because so much is at stake, Netanyahu appears to be Likud’s sole decision-maker now, in the campaign, when it comes to forging political alliances and dealing with policy management.

This includes extreme gambles such as agreeing to put Kahanists from the Otzma Yehudit party into the Knesset, riding piggyback on the religious-Zionist movement. To hammer out that deal, Netanyahu canceled at the last minute a visit to Moscow, planned for Thursday. He had arranged the trip for months amid Moscow’s anger over the Assad regime’s accidental shooting down of a Russian spy plane over Syria last September. Vladimir Putin will just have to wait.

In the eyes of many, the prime minister’s political maneuvering looks brilliant and farsighted. But along the way he’s paying a steep price beyond the moral aspects of taking on new partners like far-rightists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein. Note the hitches in Netanyahu’s visit to Poland last week, as reported by Haaretz’s Noa Landau, to get an idea of what the premier is going through. It’s a pile of impossible pressures on top of a working environment sans experienced and talented advisers and aides who have resigned.

Even though Netanyahu is making crass use of military imagery in his campaign – as in the case of his videos with soldiers, which have been banned by the Central Elections Committee – he seems to be trying not to let his political challenges and legal woes undermine his responsible judgment in security-related issues. But his decision to depart sharply from his ambiguity policy regarding Israeli airstrikes in Syria has provided a worrisome sign that this approach could change. The danger is even greater in the Palestinian arena, where Hamas could conclude that a right-wing government caught in a close election race might be susceptible to extortion. The test will come in Israel’s responses to the violence along the Gaza border fence.

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1.6959123Thu, 21 Feb 2019 23:51:36Amos HarelThu, 21 Feb 2019 23:50:46Foreign diplomats voiced the following warning to their Israeli interlocutors, who are preoccupied with the dramatic developments in the election campaign: The security cabinet’s decision to slash half-a-billion shekels ($140 million) from the taxes that Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority, combined with the growing instability in Gaza, greatly increase the possibility of a flare-up in the territories in the near future.

The security cabinet, under severe political constraints, decided after a delay of six months to implement legislation stipulating that the amount of money the PA pays to security prisoners jailed in Israel be subtracted from the funds transferred to the Palestinians. (The cut doesn’t apply to the larger sum the PA pays to the families of Palestinians killed by Israel, among them many terrorists.) The payment reduction could trigger a domino effect, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas intends to slash the funds transferred to Gaza by the same ratio.

According to the diplomats, the PA is already in meltdown or on the verge of collapse. The succession struggles among Abbas’ potential heirs, the cut in the American funding to the UN Refugee Agency and to other groups in the territories, and the diminished support in the West Bank for Abbas’ regime are hurling the PA into a crisis. The authority is like a wounded animal trapped in a corner. Now, following the security cabinet’s decision, Israel will take a sharp stick and thrust it into the PA’s eye. The PA might die, but before that it will muster all its strength to ensure that Israel also suffers.

That’s extremely barbed, highly unusual language for diplomats, and it’s being used by people who are involved in what’s taking place between the sides. A similar analysis, perhaps lacking some of the imagery, can also be heard from senior security officials in Israel.

The dire warning derives from the whole picture of events in the West Bank and in Gaza. Many Israelis view the payments to the prisoners as aid to terrorists convicted of murdering Israeli civilians. For the Palestinians, the prisoners aren’t only envoys of the national struggle, they’re part of a whole industry in the Palestinian economy, and serving time in Israel is work in every respect, obliging a quid pro quo. If Abbas tries to change that, he’ll risk sparking a revolt against him.

The diplomats are telling Israel: Don’t be in a rush. Wait until after the election because the cut in funds will aggravate the PA’s situation and could hasten a conflagration in Gaza, too. This week, Abbas announced that if Israel deducts the funds the PA pays the prisoners from the taxes it collects for the Palestinians, the PA will refuse to accept the rest of the tax money as well. Senior PA people say the payments to the authority officials living in the Strip will be halted already next week.

Target date

In Gaza, checks and balances have moderated the violence between Hamas and the IDF in recent months. Hamas has been letting off steam for a few weeks, allowing demonstrators to approach the border fence and clash with the army, both in Friday demonstrations and nighttime confrontations, where the violence is even worse. The prospect of significant progress in enabling a long-term cease-fire, in return for meaningful relief of the Gaza blockade, doesn’t look good. A further reduction in PA funds would heighten the economic pressure on Hamas and counter the highly useful funds from Qatar that are being used to pay government employees, help needy families and buy the fuel for power stations that has doubled the number of hours of electricity available this winter.

The foreign mediators have the impression that the negative developments are of greater concern to the Israeli military than to the civilian policy-makers – the latter, caught in a political battle, are reluctant to ease conditions in the Strip for fear of attacks from the right.

There’s no real stability in the territories at the moment. What exists is relative quiet that any chance wind could turn into a violent eruption. Hence the insistence by the new chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, to hone the readiness of IDF units for the possibility of combat in Gaza. If Kochavi reaches the target date – this summer after the election and the formation of a new government – without a confrontation there, it might be considered a real achievement for him. It might also generate greater attentiveness among his superiors regarding plans for building up IDF forces.

Goodwill gesture

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has been in Cairo for the past two weeks. He rejected a Russian invitation to attend conciliation talks with PA and Fatah officials in Moscow. This could be the result of a veto by Egypt, which doesn’t want to lose the upper hand in organizing talks between the rival Palestinian camps, no matter how unlikely they are to progress.

In the background, Palestinian sources in Gaza cite persistent rumors that Egypt will soon release four Palestinians it arrested in the summer of 2015. The four, officers in Hamas’ maritime commando force, were arrested in a peculiar incident while traveling by bus from the Rafah crossing to Cairo Airport. Armed men took over the bus and removed the four, but Egypt hasn’t stated officially that it’s holding Hamas people, despite repeated requests by the organization’s leaders. According to reports in the Palestinian media, the four were on the way to training in Iran, and their arrest might have been the product of intelligence provided by Israel.

A release of the Hamas men from prison in Egypt would be considered an accomplishment for the organization’s leaders in the Strip. It could be an Egyptian goodwill gesture to ensure that the tension between Hamas and Israel doesn’t lurch out of control in the months ahead. And possibly it could be seen as a small chance to make progress in the case of the Israelis and the bodies of IDF soldiers held by Hamas in Gaza – nothing favorable has happened on this front for a long time.

Michal: My husband is from Florence, so we’re going there for two days and then back home to Panama. We’ve lived in Panama for 11 years.

Sounds pretty exotic.

Michal: My husband’s father founded a company there and asked us to come. It turns out there’s a large Jewish community. The children go to a Jewish school. It’s fun in Panama.

How was Israel?

Michal: Charming. My husband and I have family here; we came to see them. We usually visit every two years.

Mindi, do you remember your earlier visits here?

Mindi: No, my brain is blank, but I do remember we went to a pool. This time we didn’t go.

Michal: This is the first time we’ve visited in winter. We even had to buy coats for the children, because in Panama it’s hot all the time. My family lives in Timrat [in northern Israel], and now the anemones and cyclamens are in bloom – flowers the children don’t know.

Mindi: We just walked and walked. It was a little boring.

What do you like doing?

Mindi: Playing in the pool. I don’t like the sea because it’s cold and there are fish. We were taken to see tanks; I liked climbing on them.

Michal: My father took us to Latrun, to the tanks [at the Armored Corps Museum].

Mindi: There were ants all over them. I really had a good time in Israel; I loved playing with my cousins.

Cousins are fun.

Mindi: I have a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins here; I didn’t even get to meet them all – my grandpa has eight brothers and sisters. And I also really improved my Hebrew.

What language do people speak in Panama?

Michal: Spanish. The children speak four languages: Spanish, English, Hebrew with me and Italian with my husband.

Did you meet your husband in Israel or Italy?

Michal: We actually met in Tokyo. I was in Japan on a post-army trip and I stayed to go to university.

Isn’t it awfully hard to study in Japanese?

Michal: It was hard, but I did it. Then I did four years of electronics at a Japanese university.

Hard-core.

Michal: Back then there were no foreigners, and if there were, they were Chinese. The closest ones to me were students from Saudi Arabia. Japan is a different planet.

In what way?

Michal: Many times I found myself just watching the way things are served, how people behave even on public transportation, how people work. Let’s say you forgot a bag somewhere – you’ll go back hours later and find it in the same place or at the local police station. It was really terrific. But I’m not sure I’d do it again.

Why?

Michal: Because even after I could speak Japanese I wasn’t accepted; I remained a foreigner. The Japanese are very insular. Sometimes it seems they’re not nice, but it’s not like that. They keep their distance because they believe it’s wrong to intervene.

Sounds like a way to be alone.

Michal: After university there was a period when I no longer had friends in Japan who spoke Hebrew, and I felt alone. That’s how I got to a Chabad House. It was always walking distance from where I lived, but it took me seven years to get there. My husband would go there regularly, but the first time I went he was on a visit to Italy. Everyone told me, “There’s someone you have to come back to meet, you’re a perfect match.”

And were they right?

Michal: Absolutely.

Fast-forward to four children later.

Five – I have another son, Ariel; he went with his dad to return the car.

For someone traveling with five children and 10 suitcases, you seem pretty calm.

Michal: Sometimes it’s chaotic, but fun. You just have to accept it. We like being together.

Kids, do you miss home?

Mindi: I get to Panama, go to sleep, and as soon as I wake up – school.

Nofar: We covered all the attractions in two days. The Vatican is wild.

Eldan: Four days and four nights we toured and ate.

Was it tasty?

Nofar: Our last supper was good.

Like Jesus’?

Nofar: I don’t know what he ate; we went for risotto.

Eldan: They go a little overboard with their pastas. On the first day, they suggested the ravioli special. We were still young and beautiful, and we said wow. On the last day, we said, enough already with the spinach/carbonara/Bolognese ricotta.

Where do you know each other from?

Eldan: We met at Ben-Gurion University [in Be’er Sheva].

Nofar: We’re taking psychology and biology.

Itamar: That’s a degree for the indecisive: It suits every direction – biology, psychology, veterinary studies, medicine. It puts off the decision.

Sharon: The degree is meant to be an introduction to brain sciences.

Do you want to study brain sciences?

Sharon: That was the original idea, but in the meantime …

Eldan: You’re back to being confused.

Itamar: It isn’t only a degree for the confused, it’s a confusing degree.

Eldan: I’ve only become more confused.

Nofar: And before the degree you weren’t confused?

Eldan: I had a brief period of clarity.

Nofar: And what did you want to study then?

Eldan: Medicine, but I wasn’t accepted.

I hear Be’er Sheva is good for students.

Eldan: There’s a student bubble in the poor neighborhoods.

Nofar: It’s because of the structure of the university. It’s so cheap to live nearby that everyone lives next to everyone else.

Itamar: There’s a student atmosphere, but that’s not suitable for everyone.

Sharon: What does a student atmosphere mean? It’s mainly parties, the Baraka Club or the Funjoya Festival in Eilat. All kinds of mainstream with a particular target audience.

Itamar: The atmosphere was one of the things that drew me to Be’er Sheva, and it really exists. I even enjoyed it for a semester or two.

Nofar: And then you get tired of it and focus on your studies.

Sharon: The city itself isn’t interesting, not even the Old City, even though it has tons of potential. The weekends are boring. Everything is pretty much dead.

Itamar: When there’s no school, there’s nothing. So you go to your parents for the weekend and come back with boxes of food.

Are the studies good at least?

Eldan: I’m very disappointed so far, I’m pissed off at the lecturers.

Sharon: I like it. The degree is really interesting and I really enjoy what I’m studying.

Eldan: I like the material, but I don’t feel a need to go to class. There are some really irritating lecturers. They seem mainly focused on themselves. There are a lot of courses that you take in the form of exercises, and many of them are actually all about how to pass the exam. I have the feeling that I’m paying to take exams.

Itamar: Yes, there are moments when it becomes a competition of numbers, and I hate that.

Eldan: It’s not about being good but about making money. I thought I would go to university and the exams would be about the way of doing things, but in the end it feels the opposite. It’s something like the army – you think that all kinds of things will be all kinds of things, but then they’re totally not.

There you go, you’ve already learned something.

Eldan: A degree has become something that society, namely the university, sells.

Itamar: And in getting admitted to the university, too, the tests are a matter of supply and demand, not ability. For example, even though physics is a harder subject than biology, it’s easier to get into physics because there’s less demand. So people can be admitted but they may not be able to learn ...

Nofar: And people who have more money can do preparatory courses.

Sharon: There needs to be some sort of filtering.

Itamar: They should be more creative with the filtering.

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1.6958968Thu, 21 Feb 2019 22:16:20Tomer PersicoThu, 21 Feb 2019 22:16:06When the image of Srulik, the iconic cartoon character that symbolized Israel, appears on the cover of a book, we know we’d better sit down. It’s a momentous event. Something in us, in our very essence, in our sheer Israeliness, isn’t what it used to be. The sabra image created by Kariel Gardosh (known as “Dosh”) has long since been transformed from the symbol of the young state into the symbol of parting from the young state – a concise representation of everything we no longer are. Usually it turns out we’re no longer young, beautiful, secular and just.

Every society undergoes change, but in Israel the transformations seem especially rapid and, in a particularly reflective culture – the Jewish self-awareness that Woody Allen made a caricature of – there will clearly be a need for constant introspection. The freneticism accompanying these changes is also understandable: Not enough time has passed since the shtetl for us to feel that we’re comfortable in modernity. Even when what has been repressed isn’t really threatening to burst onto the surface, just the fear that it will can stir anxiety. Accordingly, self-examination and accountability are called for at all times.

Two Hebrew-language studies from the previous decade come to mind in this connection. Their very titles attest to the end of an era: “The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony” (2001) by Baruch Kimmerling and “Farewell to Srulik” (2004) by Oz Almog. Authored by sociologists, these two books marked the transition from denial to awareness, possibly even mourning. Things aren’t what they were, we’re told, and not necessarily for the better.

In his encyclopedic work, Almog summed up the transformations, as he saw them, in the realms of the media, law, women’s status, the family and psychology. The plethora of quotations he generously (at times tediously) offered the reader were intended to illustrate how the Israeli elite (“the veteran Jewish stratum, secular, educated, established”) parted ways from Srulik, who as usual embodies the Israel that is no more.

However, Almog’s explanation for the parting is flawed. In his view, along with the inertia that saps the energy of every revolution, it was the media which reshaped the Israeli consciousness. Supposedly, the media’s control of the agenda caused the Israeli elite to forsake the shared Zionist vision for “globalist consumerism.” Almog concludes by expressing his concern that no new ideological framework will coalesce, and Israelis will gradually be divested of their Jewish identity. Fifteen years on, it’s easy to see that the exact opposite has occurred.

Kimmerling undoubtedly probed deeper than Almog. He eulogized the “Ahusalim” – his acronym for the secular, socialist, nationalist Ashkenazim who founded the country and tried, based on a collectivist “statist” agenda and the social “melting pot” they forcefully forged, to shape the state in their image. The Ahusalim failed, and since the 1970s gradually disappeared from their positions of control and influence.

Kimmerling ascribed most of the responsibility for what he called “the decline of Israeliness” to the Gush Emunim settler movement – something of an Ahusali approach in itself. The messianic spearhead of the religious-Zionist movement supposedly brought to the surface the religious and ethnocentric elements implicit in secular Zionism and hurled them in every direction (though mainly toward Judea and Samaria). The universal humanism in the hearts of the Ahusalim and the civic-republican ethos of the young state were too feeble to resist. Both faded.

But Kimmerling reversed things. It wasn’t Gush Emunim that ruptured the hegemony of the Ahusalim; it was their rupture that allowed the self-confident bullying of Gush Emunim. First, the weakening of the ruling leftist Mapai party in the trauma of the Yom Kippur War – the crisis of faith that seized secular Israelis at the sight of the demigods from the Six-Day War, floundering and humiliated. Second, and more significantly, it was the erosion of socialist collectivism in favor of liberal individualism, that rewrote the Israeli ethos. Both made it possible for religious Zionism, that admired, almost to the point of worship, not only secular generals but also the state’s leaders, to take the reins and the law into their hands. Likud’s rise to power in 1977 completed the process and did much more than religious Zionism to inject what Kimmerling calls “Jewish-ethnocentric categories” into the Israeli identity.

Demise of ‘Hebrewness’

What then brought about the end of Ahusali hegemony? Why did we part from Srulik? Two recently published books reexamine the metamorphoses undergone by Israeli society. Neither was written by a sociologist, and maybe that’s why it’s easier to see them as milestones. They’re also complementary. In Hebrew, Rami Livni writes about “The End of Hebrewness: Why Israel Is Not in a Crisis but in the Midst of a Revolution,” while Shmuel Rosner and Prof. Camil Fuchs offer “#IsraeliJudaism: A Portrait of a Cultural Revolution.” The word “revolution” appears in the title of both books, and both have Srulik on the cover; no one here apparently intends to leave any doubt. But while Livni delivers a melancholy lament, Rosner and Fuchs, despite their repeated declarations that they’re only reporting from the field, are celebrating.

Livni, an educator, philosopher and cultural critic who writes op-eds for Haaretz, bemoans the fading of “Hebrewness,” invoking a term used by the Zionist pioneers to describe themselves. The pioneers, insisting on their separateness from Diaspora Jews, created Hebrewness on the soil of the Land of Israel. It’s the original and most-rooted Jewish culture, the nationalist Judaism that springs up as truth from a specific land. In contrast to traditional Judaism, Hebrewness isn’t rootless and ghettoized but proud and entrenched, and will transform the Children of Israel into a free and normal people in their own land.

As Livni elaborates, Hebrewness favored sovereignty, activeness, initiative, secularity, innovation, fulfillment, modernity, normality and excellence. It aimed to forge a complete person, exceptional and generous, with feet on the ground and head held high. The Hebrew would both exist independently on his own land and be part of the world community of nations. He would maintain a just and exemplary society based on the vision of the prophets and in accordance with international law. He would make the desert bloom and settle the land, while protecting and working for all its inhabitants. He would engage in science and bring prosperity. He would fight for a life of justice, fraternity and freedom.

This would be a fitting ending for 2,000 years in exile – an ending that, in Livni’s elucidation, would reinterpret the ordeals of the Jewish people as cutting a path to a modern, normal existence, not one swallowed up in messianic pyrotechnics. The Hebrew would be a “complete Jew,” in the words of A.B. Yehoshua, unlike Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox and Reform Jews who have chosen to remain in the Diaspora, mentally or physically.

Hebrewness, as a Jewish identity, has been fading this century, Livni writes. The consolidation of the right wing in power alters the Israeli mentality. According to Livni, the right isn’t striving for normality. Its nationalism isn’t bent on integration into the universal democracy but on ethnos, religion and territory. Peace with Israel’s neighbors isn’t an ideal and maybe isn’t desirable. There is no thrust for realistic achievement but rather a desire to express emotion. “Few people expect [Benjamin] Netanyahu to put forward a solution on the Palestinian issue, or wonder what he achieved in his frenetic lobbying on the Iranian question .… Netanyahu gets a prize for his efforts, for his fine rhetoric and for ‘letting them have it’ …. Talk has replaced action. The experience has replaced the result.”

Livni locates the source of the problem in the lack of structure of Jewish nationalist secularity. European secularity, he explains, was from the outset interwoven with nationalism, in contrast to Jewish secularity, which did not develop a concept of a secular state. Zionism used religious symbols in its national enterprise, even rabbinical authority, as for conversion or marriage, for example. The religion-state “status quo” was aimed at “taming” religion but entrenched an unstable balance. Israeli secularity started to atrophy with the decline of Labor Party hegemony, “in the first stage sinking into sectarianism (the Shinui and Yesh Atid parties), until later losing its way and substance.” Secularity diverged from the statist ethos and from the ambition to lead, and ultimately was privatized into liberal individualism.

Thus secularity was fated to disappear. “The breach between the Jewish religion and modern Jewish identity will be resealed …. The secular community will increasingly resemble a variation of the traditional community.” The transition, Livni writes in sorrow, has been from “Hebrewness” as a new and final definition of Jewishness, to “Israeli Judaism,” in which Israeliness simply constitutes the current trappings of Judaism, and to be a complete Israeli it is necessary to be a Jew.

Private Judaism

That’s precisely the conclusion reached by Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs. Their impressively broad survey maps the current Jewish identity in Israel. Rosner is a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute and an op-ed contributor to The New York Times. Fuchs is a statistics professor at Tel Aviv University and an adviser to the Dialog polling institute. In two rounds, they asked representative sample of 3,500 Israeli Jews a bevy of questions on their worldview and way of life. The questions were divided into two themes: Jewish tradition and religion, and Jewish nationalism in Israel.

The “nationalism” questions deal, for example, with attitudes to military service and living abroad. “Religious” questions touch on reciting kiddush Friday evening, burial preference and civil marriage. The answers were weighted to let the researchers assign each respondent a point on a graph vis-à-vis a religious Jewish identity or a nationalist Jewish identity. Based on the results, Rosner and Fuchs divided Israeli Jewish society into four groups: “Jews,” who “practice mostly Jewish traditions and many fewer Israeli customs” (17 percent); “Israelis,” whose identity is mainly nationalist (15 percent); “universalists,” who emphasize secular and civic values (13 percent); and “Jewraelis” – “those who are practicing tradition and nationality” (55 percent).

The dominance of the “Jewraelis” is the book’s main message: A new Jewish culture has been forged in Israel – Israeli Judaism – fusing national identity with religious identity. According to the authors, if we wish to locate these developments in Jewish history, what’s taking shape is Jewish tradition with a national hue. This Judaism is less based on halakha (traditional Jewish law), less secular (in the ideological sense of the word) and less traditional (in the Mizrahi sense of the word).

Because the questions were formulated by the researchers, we can perhaps be skeptical about the resulting percentages, and a certain element of begging the question is apparent. Still, the authors, who also draw on earlier polls and studies, cite an array of evidence that seems to support their findings. Increasingly broad margins of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community are undergoing what Prof. Kimmy Caplan calls “Israelization.” The Haredim are becoming more nationalist, are adopting Zionist and right-wing views and are integrating into Israeli society as a whole. The classic Haredi identity – isolationist, anti-modern and anti-national – is being challenged and, in certain circles, is disintegrating.

The religious-Zionist movement, as was already apparent in an Israel Democracy Institute study led by Prof. Tamar Hermann (“The National-Religious Sector in Israel 2014”), is grounding its identity more in a nationalist/right-wing agenda and less in a halakhic approach. Settling the Land of Israel and defending the state have become the main components of this community’s outlook and Jewish identity. Accordingly, this group experienced “mass desertion” (as the authors put it) involving the shedding of religious observance. The group’s size remains stable only because of a high birthrate.

“Traditional Jews” in Israel are becoming more secular: Rabbinical authority is diminishing and Orthodoxy is no longer considered the only authentic form of Judaism. Many people who grew up in traditional homes now categorize themselves as secular. Although it’s also true that secular Israelis are showing a renewed interest in Jewish tradition, this is occurring on an individual basis, and people so inclined are preserving their autonomy in the face of the religious establishment. Secular Israelis are adopting a self-designed private Judaism, or are joining Reform or Conservative Judaism.

Indeed, one of the findings of the #IsraeliJudaism Project reinforces what’s been turning up in surveys on the subject since 2013: About 10 percent of Israeli Jews call themselves Reform or Conservative (in the book, the figures are 8 percent and 5 percent, respectively). These aren’t people who are members of communities or who even regularly attend services in synagogues affiliated with the two movements. However, their declared identification with non-Orthodox Judaism shows that “Orthodoxy has become a term that is no longer congruent with authentic and genuine Jewishness, but a term that describes the religious Jew in a specific formulation.” In other words, the acceptance of the non-Orthodox denominations has turned Orthodoxy in Israel into a denomination.

Orthodoxy’s status in Israel is on the decline. Not only is the rabbinical establishment one of the institutions most despised by Israelis, but the social trend is away from Orthodoxy. The numbers presented by Rosner and Fuchs show clearly that, whereas the political thrust is rightward, religion is moving to the left: Ultra-Orthodox Jews are becoming Orthodox, Orthodox are becoming traditionalists, and traditionalists are becoming secular.

For example, 36 percent of those who grew up in a traditional home now term themselves more secular, and only 17 percent say they’re more religious. The same holds for 40 percent of those who grew up in an Orthodox home, as opposed to 20 percent who have headed in the Haredi direction. In today’s Israel, the probability that an adult will live in a home less religious than the one he grew up in is greater than the other way around. In a term coined by Yair Ettinger, a former religious-affairs correspondent of Haaretz, we are in a post-Orthodox era.

It’s also a more nationalist era. The survey shows that adopting elements from tradition leads toward nationalism (in groups up to but not including the Haredim). Those who termed themselves secular and “somewhat traditional” fly flags on Independence Day and stand to attention at the siren on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, more than those who term themselves totally secular. A correlation exists between traditional identity and nationalist identity, supporting the authors’ conclusion that a Jewish national identity, or a national Jewish identity, is developing in Israel.

It’s a Jewish but not Orthodox identity, nationalist and not universalist. According to the survey, 62 percent of Israeli Jews recite kiddush Friday evening, but 51 percent shop on Shabbat and more than half a million work on Shabbat. Sixty-eight percent keep kosher during Passover, but 55 percent feel that the Tisha B’Av fast day is just like any other day. According to 68 percent, being a good Jew entails serving in the army, 33 percent are willing to accept as a Jew anyone who feels Jewish, 58 percent support worship by Women of the Wall at the Western Wall, and only 9 percent want Israel to be an Israeli civil state, meaning not Jewish.

Haredim in crisis

Rosner and Fuchs don’t purport to explain their findings, but they create the feeling that to them the processes underway are a natural development. Reporting on the disintegration of religious Zionism, they write that Israelis combine traditionalism and nationalism, given that “everyone organizes his own mix according to the dosage that’s right for him.”

However, the secularization of the religious-Zionist community, like that of the Haredim, isn’t only a matter of convenience or personal preference. The process we’re watching augurs a sharp change in the character of religious society. By embracing nationalism, people can depart from an overriding collectivist religious identity and adopt a framework allowing for greater autonomy and individualism. In other words, nationalism is Judaism’s way of becoming modern.

Of course, this was already the situation from the inception of the Zionist movement. Zionism sought an alternative Jewish identity to tradition, basing itself on the national element. The “Hebrew” to whom Livni refers is the version that socialist Zionism proposed for a modern Jewish identity. And it worked: The Zionists were confident and proud of their Jewish identity, yet entirely secular. While evoking traditional symbolism, socialist Zionism put forward a secular ideology that rejected religion as excess baggage that was part of the past and saw itself as the authentic Jewish identity.

Livni accuses the right, which espouses an ethnoreligious concept of nationalism, of causing the decline of the “Hebrew” in the beginning of this century. Still, at the time the state was established, the right wing and its concepts were marginal and remained that way for many years. Before the right’s ideas could be adopted, the left had to make room for them. Which is exactly what happened. Secular Israelis only took an interest in tradition when they no longer considered the “Hebrew” identity a valid response to the question “in what way am I a Jew?”

Hebrewness disintegrated long before this century, in a process that included the crisis of the legitimacy of the Labor movement after the Yom Kippur War, but even more saliently, Israel’s transition from socialism to liberalism. Simply put, like the rest of the Western world, Israel became a capitalist and individualist society. (Uri Ram in his book “The Globalization of Israel” – English version 2007 – describes this well and offers a better explanation than Almog or Kimmerling.)

Once Mapai’s socialist ideals and ethos of collectivist realization became invalid, the secular community began searching for a new way to formulate its Jewish identity. Unsurprisingly, that way was discovered in the Jewish tradition, but not as a turn to religion. After all, secular Jews had already internalized Western individualism; many of them were unwilling (and will not be willing) to join halakha’s demanding and collectivist framework. They prefer to form their Jewish identity around a cultural interest (a pluralistic religious study hall) or a spiritual interest (New Age) in tradition, and to tailor themselves a customized Jewish suit. Nationalism dovetails well with this development, as it provides Jewish elements in abundance without a need to make lifestyle changes. As distinct from the various types of fascism, democratic nationalism empowers – not suppresses – individualism.

On the other side are the Haredim and the religious Zionists, two groups coping with their own identity crises. The former want to join the general society for a number of interconnected reasons: economic needs, a severe leadership crisis and the disillusionment brought on by the online world. The latter, like the secular community, have been left without an ideological center since the collapse of the messianism of the school of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook in the 1990s, and more intensely since the demolition of the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, in 2005. For both these groups, nationalism offers both a share in Israeliness and a modern, liberal and more individual version of Jewish identity.

This blend of variables explains why Israeli society is becoming simultaneously more traditionalist, more nationalist and more liberal. Of course, an important exception to the thrust of Israeli liberalism is the attitude toward the Palestinians; but it, too, is attributable to the same processes. Apart from the national conflict, which understandably arouses antagonism, an Israeli who weds his Jewish identity to Israeli nationalism will seek to empower the “Judaism” of the state, and this will come at the expense of his Palestinian neighbors in a variety of ways.

The question of “Jewish identity” has been at the heart of Jewish existence since the 18th century. Having been compelled to leave their traditional way of life and adjust to a modern Western culture, the Jews unsurprisingly find themselves in repeated cycles of search and identity-molding. Srulik, or everything he represents, proposes a “Hebrew,” nationalist, collectivist, secular version of Jewish identity. Parting from Srulik is enabling the current cycle of shaping the Israeli Jewish identity: an individualist identity but close to tradition, post-Orthodox and ethno-national. Without a doubt, this Israeli Jewish identity will also be supplanted by a new one in the future, setting in motion a new wave of nostalgia.

Tomer Persico, a research fellow and scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute, is also the Koret visiting assistant professor at the UC Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies.

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1.6958869Thu, 21 Feb 2019 22:14:20Yossi VerterThu, 21 Feb 2019 22:14:12The Kahol Lavan alliance founded on Thursday by Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid and co. in Savyon was set up for one purpose only: to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu democratically through the April 9 election. Not by an indictment or High Court of Justice petitions next year or later.

This is the most heavily invested, serious political enterprise to oust Netanyahu since 1999. Then, two chiefs of staff and one general (Ehud Barak, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Yitzhak Mordechai) got together and generated an upheaval.

This time, three reserve lieutenant-generals (Gantz, Moshe Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi) with Sgt. (res.) Lapid are on the starting line. Nothing is holding this party together but the desire to hear Netanyahu’s concession speech at the end of election day. That’s its strength, but also its weakness and self-destruct mechanism.

>> Read more: Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain’t seen nothing yet ■ Israel's Blue and White Boys Club wants your vote

Even the most high-resolution video camera wouldn’t be able to pick up a smidgen of shared ideology, whether in foreign affairs, socio-economic affairs, judicial and constitutional issues, or regarding the territories’ future and the settlements’ fate. Nothing. There is no common denominator save the slogans about change and love and fraternity.

A bunch of mostly amiable and well-meaning men and women came together for a kind of anthropological experiment. It’s a little like the “2025” Israeli reality show – something new, shiny, auspicious, the next thing! But it’s difficult to make out who’s against whom and what the hell they want from us. Oh yes, to topple Bibi.

An election defeat will expose the failures of this ambitious project and break it up even before the Knesset ushers learn to recognize the new MKs flooding the house.

The day after the election consists of more unknowns than facts. Take the rotation agreement between Gantz and Lapid, for example, under which the former would serve as prime minister two-and-a-half years and the latter would replace him for a year-and-a-half. On paper, it looks as easy as a hot knife through butter. But the chance that Gantz will leave the office and Lapid will stroll in is extremely slight.

In any event, there’s no certainty that the politically unseasoned Gantz’s government will last 30 months. Even if it does, the ministers may prefer to dismantle the cabinet and hold a new election. They’re not bound to the agreement Lapid made with Gantz.

If Netanyahu sets up the cabinet, he may offer Gantz and Lapid to join him. The issue on the table will be Trump’s peace plan. That could be an incentive. Who will join, who will remain outside?

The greatest mystery isn’t related to the union in the center-left’s ranks, but its impact on the election cannot be understated. It’s the looming decision of the attorney general in Netanyahu’s corruption cases. Will it strengthen Likud or weaken it? Will it move votes from one bloc to another or not? And what effect will a decision to indict for bribery in one or more cases have on the president’s recommendation?

While the dust is yet to settle after the center-left bloc’s big bang, it appears the turning point occurred last Sunday. A day before Lapid submitted his Knesset slate, he held a long meeting with Gabi Ashkenazi, who has worked tirelessly to bring about the partnership.

At the end of the meeting the penny dropped. Lapid made a decision – at this stage in principle – to abandon the dream and take a good, hard look at reality. He realized that his train had left the station the moment Gantz entered it. He also understood that his only chance to be prime minister in the foreseeable future is on the back of the new, seductive, attractive white knight, the one he once was.

He put aside not only his ego but his honor as well. His obstinacy to run alone was replaced by an open mind.

Ashkenazi served as an honest broker between them. He has a longtime relationship with Lapid – the two and their wives had dinner at the Ashkenazis in Kfar Sava some six months ago. He is less close to Gantz, but the two trust and respect each other. Gantz made several attempts to recruit Ashkenazi to his party regardless of the merger. But Ashkenazi didn’t want to hear about it.

Two opposing worldviews clashed on the via dolorosa to the agreement. Lapid argued that Netanyahu would be re-elected, but that his time is limited. He would be ejected from the political realm to the courts’ jurisdiction in a year or so. Then the gates of heaven will open up to them. What's happening now is just the preview, the foreplay to what will transpire in 2020. So let’s be patient. There’s no need to merge, we’ll grow stronger separately.

Gantz persistently advocated the opposite. You have no idea what will happen in the coming year, he said. Everything could change and we’ll find ourselves with Bibi in power for four whole years. This is the time to act; this is our opportunity.

On Monday, Lapid submitted his slate. On Tuesday, Gantz submitted his. Only after each had announced he was running independently did they start to talk business. The prime minister was watching with interest the three general scheming to oust him and probably was reflecting on the difficult memories from two decades ago.

At the end of Gantz’s speech, in which he scolded Lapid that “a shift schedule is no reason to give up a chance for historic change,” the chairman of Hosen L’Yisrael-Telem said he was going to call Lapid and invite him to a meeting. The Lapidniks were surprised. Why announce something that could end with nothing?

But the two had already agreed to meet that night. One of Israel’s best pollsters, Israel Bachar, whom Gantz had lured away from Naftali Bennett, met with Gantz the previous evening and urged him to merge with Lapid. This is your only chance of being prime minister after this election, he said. Hosen’s voters’ loyalty isn’t assured, he said, and could return to Yesh Atid at any moment. Running together doesn’t ensure victory, but it at least gives a chance.

Lapid and Gantz met on Tuesday night and again on Wednesday in Savyon. When Orli Levi-Abekasis declared she wasn’t going to join Gantz’s ticket after all, Lapid got the phone call: Let’s close the deal.

Sleeping with Kahanists

Merely 25 hours before the registration of parties running for the election closed, the agreement that will be remembered as an eternal abomination was reached. Rabbi Kahane’s hoodlum-students, those who spread hatred, racism and persecution of minorities, who carry the flag of homophobia and “race purity” won a ticket to the Israeli parliament.

Habayit Hayehudi’s central committee members have their fingerprints all over this disgrace, but Netanyahu made it happen. He once again proved that when his political survival – and this time personal survival, too – is at stake, nothing is too low; he has no morality or limits.

>> Read more: Netanyahu just destroyed one of Israel’s key national security assets ■ Condemned Farrakhan and his fans? Now do the same for Jewish Power, Netanyahu and the Likud ■ Netanyahu now endorses Jewish fascism. U.S. Jews, cut your ties with him now

The transformation of Rabbi Rafi Peretz, the leader of Habayit Hayehudi, from an educator to a cynical politician without an ideology, is one of the fastest and most amazing ones in politics. Two weeks ago, he still objected to the extremism of his designated partner Bezalel Smotrich.

Then he embraced him, and on Wednesday he gave a fire and brimstone speech in favor of Itamar Ben Gvir, of the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party.

The media reported that Netanyahu was forced to pay a “heavy price” to the radical right to ensure the merger. Heavy to whom? Not to himself. He didn’t bat an eyelid when he pledged to give Peretz-Smotrich two important portfolios in his next cabinet and reserve a place for another of their party on the Likud ticket. The silence of the Likudniks is shameful, and Justice Minister Shaked is welcoming the merger with chilling sangfroid.

Netanyahu accused Gantz and Lapid of "relying on Arab parties who not only don't recognize the State of Israel," but want to destroy it. He said Israel has already seen such a scenario of "leftist generals," giving former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the "Oslo disaster" as an example.

The prime minister accused Lapid and Gantz of advocating a second disengagement, "a whitewashed word for dislocating settlements." He claimed to have withstood immense pressure from former U.S. President Barack Obama, and did not evacuate settlements in the West Bank.

>> Read more: Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain’t seen nothing yet ■ Courting Kahanists, Netanyahu takes politics to the gutter

Netanyahu stressed Israel's situation has never been better diplomatically, citing burgeoning Arab ties and the U.S. decision to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The prime minister criticized Gantz for mocking his military record in a recent speech. "I, who risked my life. But today Benny Gantz is ready to give the premiership to Yair Lapid, whose military experience is a reporter for 'Mahane,'" he said, referring to the Israeli army's newspaper.

Netanyahu's comments come shortly after Gantz and Lapid held their first press conference after announcing the formation of their alliance, Kahol Lavan. Speaking at a Tel Aviv event, Gantz called for "national reconciliation instead of incitement" while Lapid declared the establishment of "a ruling party."

Three separate polls gave Kahol Lavan a significant lead over Netanyahu's Likud party: Channel 12's poll showed the party would get 36 seats in the next Knesset, while Likud would receive 30. Channel 13's poll, meanwhile, predicted Kahol Lavan would get 36 seats, compared to 26 for Likud.

Public broadcaster Kan's poll predicted 35 seats for Kahol Lavan, and Likud following up with 32.

Channel 12 also asked respondents who they preferred as prime minister. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed said they would rather see Netanyahu stay in the Prime Minister's Office, while 36 percent said they favored Gantz and Lapid.

Just hours after Gantz and Lapid announced the formation of Kahol Lavan, Channel 12's poll showed the union would get 36 seats in the next Knesset, while Likud would receive 30.

Channel 13's poll, meanwhile, predicted Kahol Lavan would get 36 seats, compared to 26 for Likud. Kan's poll also put Kahol Lavan on first place, with 35 seats, with Likud coming in second with 32.

>> Read more: Netanyahu's embrace of racist right is repulsive, but you ain’t seen nothing yet ■ Courting Kahanists, Netanyahu takes politics to the gutter

In his first press conference since announcing the joint party, Gantz said in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening that "Israel has lost its way," adding that "we are here tonight to say 'enough.'"

Gantz, a former Israeli army chief of staff who founded the party Hosen L'Yisrael before merging with Lapid, called for diplomacy instead of extremism and "national reconciliation instead of incitement."

According to Gantz, "something has gone awry in the last decade, because Israel lost its way. This is a divide-and-conquer government that tears people apart." Gantz said he and Lapid "set our egos aside in favor of a shared agenda. Neither of us are above the people nor above the state. On April 9 we're going to win the election, big time."

"We see the Haredi community as an inseparable part of Israeli society and call for mutual respect. We will prove we want and can live and work together," Gantz said.

Lapid, for his part, called the Kahol Lavan a "wall of hope," saying, "Today we established a ruling party." He criticized Netanyahu for forming an "extremist" union with the far-right nationalist parties, and said the alliance was formed to confront the "bad spirits" pervading Israeli society and discourse.

Channel 12 also asked respondents who they preferred as prime minister. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed said they would rather see Netanyahu stay in the Prime Minister's Office, while 36 percent said they favored Gantz and Lapid.

Netanyahu addressed the new alliance shortly after Gantz and Lapid's press conference and accused the duo of "relying on Arab parties who not only don't recognize the State of Israel," but want to destroy it.

Netanyahu said Israel has already seen such a scenario of "leftist generals," giving former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the "Oslo disaster" as an example.

Netanyahu stressed Israel's situation has never been better diplomatically, citing burgeoning Arab ties and the U.S. decision to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

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1.6958805Thu, 21 Feb 2019 20:37:58Netta AhituvThu, 21 Feb 2019 20:37:51The rays of a winter sun crept out from the cracks between the gray clouds as the doctors, nurses, acupuncturists and other Israeli volunteers – all of them women – gathered early one Saturday morning at the gas station near the Al-Walaja checkpoint south of Jerusalem. Happy to see one another, they embraced and talked about the day ahead. They soon got into two minibuses that, completely full, made their way toward Beit Ummar, a Palestinian town of 14,000 near Hebron between the settlement of Carmei Tzur and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc.

For the past 28 years, the mobile clinics of Physicians for Human Rights have been passing through checkpoints, both physical and proverbial, and providing medical services in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On these days, which are set in advance and announced to the local people, doctors from various fields offer treatment and medical advice. Hundreds of Palestinians are examined and treated every week by Israeli volunteer physicians.

On this particular Saturday, the mobile clinic that arrived in Beit Ummar provided services for women – gynecology, family medicine, psychological and psychiatric advice, and even acupuncture, the latter from Acupuncturists Without Borders.

The minibuses pulled up at a school that functioned as a medical center for the day. The volunteers took up their positions in classrooms equipped as temporary clinics. Outside the school, a “drugstore” was quickly set up; two volunteer pharmacists filled prescriptions that the local women received from the doctors.

Among the latter was Mushira Aboo Dia, 40, a senior gynecologist and obstetrician, and the new chairwoman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. She’s the first woman and the first Arab to hold the post. And that’s not the only extraordinary development in her life. She assists Palestinians in the territories, while five brothers and one sister have volunteered to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, some in combat units.

And not only that. Four of her brothers and one sister have undergone Orthodox conversion to Judaism in Israel and today live a Jewish life in every respect. One had joined the African-American Hebrew Israelite Community of Dimona and lived with the community until his death in a road accident. A number of the siblings are Sabbath-observant and keep kosher, and the sister lives in a religiously oriented settlement with her Jewish family.

Aboo Dia draws a connection between her life in a family deeply embedded in Jewish society – not least attending Jewish schools – and her siblings’ decision to convert.

“Growing up like that influences your choices, even if you belong to a different ethnic-religious group,” she says. She and her siblings grew up “like that” because their mother, a woman from a devout Muslim family with unbridled willpower, who was illiterate and whose parents married her off when she was 16 to a man 30 years older, was determined to get them the best education possible. And that meant Jewish schools.

Does it bother you that your siblings chose to convert?

Aboo Dia: “It’s not easy to straddle the fence your whole life, being neither here nor there, knowing that I never really belonged to any group. I can understand their choice.”

You visit the territories frequently and see the suffering of the Palestinians because of the settlements. Is it hard for you to visit your sister who lives in one?

“I see completely what the settlements are causing, but am I going to wreck family ties because of that? We come from the same family, and that will never change. They bought a plot of land there, because it’s so much cheaper than anywhere else. I believe that if my sister could manage to live in Israel, she’d prefer that. We don’t see each other often, so a political argument is the last thing we have time for. I hope that when we’ll have to talk about [politics], we’ll be able to do it in a way that won’t hurt the relations between us.”

What are the family gatherings like? Are there no arguments or bad feelings?

“The gatherings are mostly of the siblings from the same mother, and they’re calm and pleasant because we don’t talk about religion or politics. We mostly tell stories from when we were little, remember childhood events and recall our mother [who died four years ago]. These days most of us have time to meet, usually at Passover, when the family gathering includes a barbecue at the home one of my sisters, who lives in an Arab village. We serve rolls that are kosher for Passover, and kosher and halal meat.”

Are you thinking about converting?

“No. If I had thoughts like that, it was when I was younger. It’s hard to always feel that you’re on the other side, but as an adult I don’t feel the need to convert to be accepted. Today I know that people who want to accept me will do so, and those who don’t won’t accept me even after a conversion. Religion, any religion, doesn’t preoccupy me anymore. I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t eat pork anyway because I’m a vegetarian. And in the past I also fasted at Ramadan – but that was because of tradition, not religion. My friends and colleagues have never wondered why I haven’t converted.”

The only time Aboo Dia was asked to explain why she hasn’t converted was when a patient asked about it.

“She was pregnant with twins and I accompanied her during the pregnancy and at the birth,” Aboo Dia says. “When the new mother came for a checkup after the birth, she said, ‘You’re such an amazing doctor, how is it that you don’t convert?’ It took a minute for that to sink in, but then I put her in her place.

“It was hard because I understood exactly why she was asking the question. Some Jews have a hard time reconciling a ‘good doctor’ with a non-Jewish woman. The dissonance in her head, between the fact that I’m her doctor and the fact that I’m an Arab woman, put a dent in her worldview. It didn’t make sense to her. For her to resolve the contradiction in her mind, I’d have to convert.”

Aboo Dia’s siblings each converted for their own reasons, she says, some after marrying a Jewish partner. Her brother Yusuf Abu-Zaim, 59, says in a phone call from Ireland, where he has lived for eight years, that he first considered converting when he was a B.A. student of economics and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. But he found the process too demanding.

A few years later he met a Jewish-Italian woman – who later became his wife, then his ex – and decided to convert for her sake. First he studied Judaism twice a week at a Jerusalem yeshiva, and later studied intensively, every day, spending the Sabbath at the school. Finally, when the yeshiva’s rabbi thought he had acquired sufficient knowledge, Abu-Zaim underwent questioning by a rabbinical court. Its decision: “He can be a Jew.”

He later went to Italy with his wife and their daughter; after their divorce he moved to Ireland, where he’s in a relationship with a Christian woman; the two are raising their daughter. Thus Abu-Zaim has a connection with three monotheistic faiths.

“I introduce myself as a Jewish Israeli and try not to talk politics with people who don’t know me or my story,” he says. “If they insist, I say that I was once a Muslim and that my opinions are left-wing. When I meet Muslims, I don’t feel as if I’ve ‘left’ them – on the contrary, I feel a cultural kinship with them.

“Religious differences aren’t important for me, and I see religion as something personal, not political. My conversion wasn’t an act of rebellion against Islam, but an act of conciliation with a culture I grew up in. When I meet Jews, I sometimes feel a type of exclusion, but I’m used to feeling that I don’t belong.”

Alone on Memorial Day

Born in Lod’s “railway neighborhood,” Aboo Dia is the eldest child of her mother’s second marriage. A brother and a sister followed, and the family lived in one room in the grandparents’ apartment. Aboo Dia’s parents divorced when she was 11, and she and her mother and the two siblings moved to Ramle. Her mother provided for them by working as a cleaning lady at Assaf Harofeh Hospital. Aboo Dia’s father remarried and fathered six more children; all told, Aboo Dia has a brother and sister from the same parents and 14 half-siblings.

One memory is of a Memorial Day ceremony in high school. She wanted to participate, but her geography teacher took her aside and asked if she wouldn’t find it difficult.

“In the end, I didn’t take part; I appreciate the sensitivity that was shown me,” she says, though she remembers actively taking part in the school’s Shabbat-welcoming ceremonies as a matter of course.

“It’s hard to grow up different – you really want to be like everyone,” she says. “The further you go in high school, the greater the differences become. All the Jews get a preliminary order for military service and talk about the army, and I’m on the outside.”

She mentioned another childhood memory in her speech after she won the Gallanter Prize for social-justice leadership late last year.

As she put it, “At Purim we went out – my brother, sister and I – all of us in costumes: me in a kimono, my sister as a ballet dancer and my brother as a ninja. On the way to school we passed the astonished eyes of our Arab neighbors. Even though everyone got dressed up that day in school, I felt different from the other children. I felt like an outsider, both at school and in the neighborhood, as if I didn’t belong anywhere. Or maybe I belonged everywhere?”

One of my interviews with Aboo Dia took place on the day of the annual memorial for her mother. The Jewish siblings also attended the event, which was held at a Muslim cemetery. They spoke Hebrew among themselves, the language they feel most comfortable in. A Muslim family holding a funeral nearby stared at them in disbelief. But Aboo Dia’s family is used to getting looks like that.

When her older half-brother was killed, their mother saved money for a few months and ordered a headstone from a Jewish stonemason, so the inscription was in Hebrew. “She couldn’t read or write, either in Hebrew or in Arabic – maybe that’s why it didn’t matter to her what language was written on the tombstone,” Aboo Dia says. But the stone was smashed by people who looked askance at the Hebrew inscription in a Muslim graveyard. “That shattered her,” Aboo Dia says.

Aboo Dia is a senior obstetrician at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem, Jerusalem, and an on-call expert at the hospital’s Bat Ami Center for Victims of Sexual Abuse. She also treats high-risk patients, mostly ultra-Orthodox women, at the women’s health center run by the Clalit health maintenance organization in Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem. She has been volunteering for Physicians for Human Rights for 15 years and can be found at its mobile unit Saturdays and at its Jaffa clinic Fridays. The Jaffa facility treats asylum seekers, people with no formal legal status and people who lack medical insurance.

Two years ago she was appointed chairwoman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel after serving for many years on its board. Around the same time she completed an MBA at Harvard’s Kennedy School, part of a Wexner Foundation fellowship.

“The NGO is dear to my heart, both because of the important medical work that it does, and also because it’s an island of sanity, free of the bad things that are happening all around,” Aboo Dia says. “The amazing people who are active in the NGO prove to me every day that things could be done differently here.”

Like many rights groups, Physicians for Human Rights is also under attack. Do you encounter that personally?

“I don’t read the comments under the organization’s Facebook posts because I’ve learned that people aren’t capable of distinguishing between the political context and the human context, and of understanding that injustice is injustice even if it’s done to those you categorize as your enemy. I try to reduce stress in my life,” she says with a laugh.

“Like my mother, who was a very strong woman, my activism doesn’t take the form of demonstrating. It finds expression in my profession. I consider medicine a profession that not only heals a wounded body but also society as a whole. My volunteer work at Physicians for Human Rights lets me choose political activism and do things that advance my belief about equality and justice without leaving any group out. It’s true that we don’t do any kind of heroic medicine on those Saturdays, but basic human interaction takes place between people who live on either side of the divide and who otherwise aren’t communicating.

“My patients at Hadassah’s sex-assault center also teach me a great deal about steadfastness and resilience, and about how willpower can let victims regain control of their life after it was taken away from them. To help a woman do that – that’s the biggest prize you can get.”

When the doctor is sick

Aboo Dia, who spends most of her time treating people, took me by surprise at one of our meetings when she told me that she, too, is ill. “I was hesitant about whether to tell you. The people who are close to me know, of course, but I decided that I’m ready to say it publicly,” she says.

“Two weeks before I left for studies in the United States, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. It started with flashes in my eye, which appeared suddenly and affected my sight. My ophthalmologist said at first that it was a migraine, and afterward I was told it was an inflammation of the optic nerve.

“It passed after a time, but it set off alarm bells because I knew that it’s one of the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Five years later, it happened again, and then they thought it was lupus, an autoimmune disease. After the last attack, before I left for the States, I underwent a lot of tests that led to the diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.”

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that lasts for life. “The prognosis isn’t clear,” Aboo Dia says. “I might have an attack every five years, which has been the case so far, or it might become aggravated in the next few years, so I’m trying to do as many things as possible because I don’t know what direction it will take.”

One of those things was to realize a dream to visit New Zealand, a trip she probably wouldn’t have made if she hadn’t discovered she was sick.

What made you decide to talk about your MS in the end?

“It’s another message that I want to convey: My self-fulfillment and activity aren’t determined by my physical condition. The disease doesn’t determine who I am and what I can do in my life. Willpower, freedom of choice and the fact that I don’t let the sickness define me or my abilities make it possible for me to fly. I thought that this would empower other people who are ill.”

In general, you seem very conciliatory. You’re not angry about the hand you’ve been dealt, or about Jewish society or the racism you’ve experienced. But is that really the case?

(Smiling) “What good will anger do other than create more stress for me? I don’t want to be angry. I’m not willing to pay with my mental and physical health for the stupidity of others. True, it’s hard for me that society here is racist and doesn’t accept otherness, but I don’t intend to do nothing or just be angry about that. I’m doing all I can to change the situation, and that removes the element of anger from the equation.

“And as for the hand I’ve been dealt, the way I was raised and the person who raised me brought me to the place where I am today, so why shouldn’t I feel fortunate? I see people growing up with lots of money and luck, but without values. I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up like that.”

MS is considered a stress-related disease, and one goal of treatment is to reduce stress. But just reading your weekly schedule could stress anybody out.

“It’s true that this is something I’m not applying so well. Maybe it’s denial on my part. On the other hand, stress is good, because I truly love everything I do – the work, the volunteering and the good things that are happening in my personal life.”

Those “good things” include a relationship with Daniel Stambler, a Canadian-born Jew who lives in Jerusalem and teaches English and Buddhism. Aboo Dia asks that no further details be published about him, while promising with a wink that she doesn’t intend to convert for him.

With all the identities and perspectives you have today, how would you define yourself?

“I’m Palestinian-Israeli, not only Palestinian and not only Israeli, but both. My Israeli identity was part of me even before the Palestinian identity. I care about this place and I choose to be here out of love for it. I’m sometimes overcome by pessimism about what will happen in Israel in the years ahead, and by the thought that, if change does happen, it won’t be in my lifetime.

“On the other hand, the people I volunteer with at Physicians for Human Rights, my colleagues at the hospital and clinics, my friends and family, they all make up a strong foundation and they carry in them the possibility for change. Thanks to them I refuse to surrender.”

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1.6958510Thu, 21 Feb 2019 20:11:00Chemi ShalevThu, 21 Feb 2019 20:11:00Until proven otherwise, the dramatic, last-minute union between Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid is worthy of the moniker “Big Bang,” for the time being at least. Less than 24 hours before the deadline for submitting the parties’ lists of candidates for the Knesset, the alliance is upending Israel’s political landscape. With the addition of Gabi Ashkenazi, Gantz’s popular predecessor as army chief of staff, the new centrist alliance creates the first clear and credible threat to Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposedly inevitable victory in the April 9 election.

The Thursday morning announcement that Gantz and Lapid had reached an agreement confounded the predictions of experts and analysts. Time was too short, experts agreed, and egos too big. They underestimated the intensity of popular resistance to Benjamin Netanyahu, which unites his opponents from far left to center-right, from grassroots to the very top. Gantz and Lapid’s mutual suspicions and clashing ambitions buckled under the popular pressure on the two leaders to rise to the occasion, push the political envelope and create a united front against Netanyahu.

>> Explained: Why racist Rabbi Meir Kahane is roiling Israeli politics 30 years after his death ■ Opinion: Netanyahu now endorses Jewish fascism. U.S. Jews, cut your ties with him now

For Netanyahu, the Gantz-Lapid merger is the sum of his fears. The prime minister may have reacted to the news of the new partnership with his staple warning against “a leftist government beholden to Arabs,” but he knows the ludicrous allegation won’t sway anyone outside his loyal base. Describing a list that includes three former army chiefs with proven battle records in its top four spots as defeatist and disloyal is a bridge too far for anyone but blind admirers of the prime minister. In any other context, the Gantz-Ashkenazi-Moshe Ya'alon triumvirate would be viewed as overly hawkish, bordering on a military junta.

The union creates two separate perils for Netanyahu. The first is that the Gantz-Lapid combo would gain more Knesset seats than Likud, providing President Reuven Rivlin with an unassailable pretext to give Gantz first crack at forming a new coalition. The second is that the novelty of the Gantz-Lapid list will render their fusion greater than the sum of its parts, nudging hitherto skeptical right wing moderates to abandon Netanyahu for his rivals. For the first time since calling an early election, Netanyahu’s guaranteed right-wing majority is cast in doubt.

But the good cheer that is now enveloping the anti-Netanyahu camp should be tempered by apprehension and fear. Netanyahu, a maestro of political machinations, is now a cornered political animal fighting not only for his career but given his impending indictment by the attorney general, for his freedom as well. Netanyahu was pulling out all the stops even before the emergence of the new alliance; now he is engaged in a life and death struggle that renders him more dangerous than ever before.

So if you thought Netanyahu hit absolute rock bottom in the past few days by pressuring the religious right to incorporate the rabid right-wing and arguably racist party of former disciples of Meir Kahane, aka Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) – think again. You ain’t seen nothing yet. If this is what it takes for Netanyahu to win the election and to use his victory to escape the long arm of the law, he won’t hesitate to open the gates of hell for the evil and despicable to march through, enter the Israeli bloodstream and contaminate it for evermore.

>> The Kahanists and the homophobes: The two parties no one wants but Netanyahu needs

2. Netanyahu is undoubtedly a gifted orator, seasoned diplomat and one of the wiliest politicians on the world stage. Any fair appraisal of his tenure in office must credit Netanyahu for providing Israelis with ten years of much-appreciated stability, by their tumultuous standards. But Netanyahu now seems doomed to go down in history as a leader who corrupted the soul of his people, a cardinal sin for which there is no absolution.

All in all, when one includes his three years as prime minister in the 1990s, Netanyahu has led Israel for an astounding 13 years. In the nine that preceded the 2015 election, Netanyahu may have undermined the peace process and spread hate and division, as his critics maintain, but he seemed to know his limits and to respect the rules of the game.

In the lead-up to the 2015 election, and even more so in their wake, Netanyahu began to evolve. He cut his own term in half with a shocking announcement of early election, citing a “plot” by coalition partners Lapid and Tzipi Livni to unseat him, which turned out to be a red herring. After the election, Netanyahu admitted that the real reason was to stop the media-backed campaign waged by his rivals in the Knesset, which was aimed at compelling Sheldon Adelson’s daily freebie Yisrael Hayom to charge a nominal price from its readers. Which, when you think about it, is a far more bizarre and disturbing motivation than some puffed-up paranoid fear of a palace coup.

Netanyahu’s vile Election Day warning of the Arabs coming in buses to the polls was not a one time blip, as he later claimed, but a harbinger of things to come. His come-from-behind victory over Isaac Herzog – which was achieved despite what Netanyahu perceived as fierce and illegitimate media agitation and Obama-inspired foreign intervention – propelled him to create the most ultra-nationalist right-wing government in Israel’s history.

The new Netanyahu, who now saw himself as part martyr and part messiah, launched a crusade against his mortal enemies, the leftist elites. He would no longer play by the rules; instead, he would change them. He declared war on the very foundations of Israel’s liberal democracy, which, in his delusional paranoia, he now viewed as the enemy. He began to dismantle it, piece by piece.

Netanyahu allowed his ministers to run wild with their right-wing fantasies, which they did, packing the courts with like-minded judges, infusing religion into Israel’s secular school system, exerting political control over support for the arts and turning BDS-supporters and other harsh critics from the far left into personae non gratae and, by inference, tarring the entire left as disloyal.

Netanyahu was already engaged in a fierce battle against his perceived enemies, especially the media, when the U.S. presidency was still a twinkle in Donald Trump’s eyes. Trump’s shock election, however, turbo-charged Netanyahu with new energy and resolve. He felt the thrill of vicarious victory over the pundits and the polls, which had wrongly dismissed Trump’s chances. He had thwarted the doomsayers who warned that his antagonistic relationship with Barack Obama would end in disaster, combining his burning resentments with a self-righteous sense of vindication into venom that seeped through his veins.

Netanyahu is a cautious and calculating man by nature, but Trump’s brash brand of populism and carefree “up yours” attitude toward the same kind of elites that Netanyahu abhors invigorated him with renewed energy and purpose. Trump turned the unacceptable into a daily routine and made the outrageous seem run of the mill.The U.S. President expanded Netanyahu’s horizons and pushed him to venture into an anti-liberal and anti-democratic twilight zone, where no prime minister had gone before. By serving as a role model and by refusing to follow his predecessors, who had all intervened in one way or another to check Israel’s nationalistic and ethnocentric impulses, Trump freed Netanyahu of his inhibitions. His pathetic self-pity, vainglorious self-aggrandizement and escalating sense of “L’état c’est moi” took over instead.

When Netanyahu was confronted by the reality of an impending indictment, he drew his inspiration directly from Trump’s brazen attacks on his FBI investigators and potential prosecutors - an enemy’s list that will surely expand, if and when it comes to it, to his judges as well. Trump galvanized Netanyahu’s embrace of right-wing authoritarian regimes, even when the move entailed Holocaust revisionism and turning a blind eye to classic East European anti-Semitism, as long as it was unrelated to Israel.

Trump’s unabashed populism and ugly ethnocentrism paved Netanyahu’s way on a similar trajectory. Trump’s blatantly blind eye enabled the legislation of Netanyahu’s landmark, Jews-only nation state law. He pushed Netanyahu to embrace a worldview enunciated by John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech, albeit in a wildly different context: Henceforth, Netanyahu would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival” of the man once known as King Bibi.

Which is how Netanyahu can shrug off the nearly universal revulsion and condemnation sparked by his unrelenting pressure on the national-religious party to adopt Otzma Yehudit, and to thus revoke three decades of consensual excommunication of a party that still reveres the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, arguably the most effective racist agitator Israel has ever known. In this, the student Netanyahu outdid his White House mentor: Both were loathe to lose even the most rabidly racist votes, but while Trump hemmed and hawed before finally releasing a limp condemnation of David Duke and other white supremacists, Netanyahu opened the doors wide for their Israeli counterparts, handing them a prime ministerial “kosher” certificate and rendering them worthy of joining his coalition and wielding real power, for the first time in their history.

Cynics and critics might claim that the Kahanists’ platform - “encouraging” mass Palestinian emigration, stripping Israeli Arabs of their rights, outlawing homosexual relations and waging holy jihad against mixed marriages – are but a radical reflection of the entire Israeli right’s Weltanschauung. Nonetheless, the fact is that Kahane and his followers had been firmly placed outside the pale, until Netanyahu came along and rolled out a red carpet for their triumphant return to the fold.

3. The biblical Book of Numbers, Chapter 25, tells the salacious story of the wholesale seduction of the male portion of the People of Israel by the not-so-innocent maidens of rival nations Moab and Midian. These foreign “harlots” – as the Bible describes them – exploited their sexual appeal to entice Hebrew men to engage in the vile and perverted ways of the local demigod, Baal Peor, whose name, in some translations, means “God of the Orifice,” which leaves far too little to the imagination.

Despite God's angry order to Moses to kill all the fornicators, and the plague He then sent to make His point, the mass cross-ethnic copulation continued, unashamed and unabated. When Zimri, a prince of the tribe of Simeon, took his Midianite mistress Cozbi in broad daylight, with everyone watching, Pinheas, grandson of Great Priest Aaron, decided he had seen enough. He speared the libidinous duo to death while they were engaging in their flagrante delicto.

Rather than take umbrage at Pinheas’ unilateral decision to murder Zimri and Cozbi, God was immensely pleased. He promised Pinheas and his seed eternal peace and priesthood because “he was zealous for his God, and made an atonement for the children of Israel.” Which is the same biblical quote that adorns the montage of Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which is proudly displayed on the wall of the Hebron living room of Itamar Ben-Gvir, lawyer to right-wing radicals, disciple of the deceased Rabbi Meir Kahane, convicted racist inciter and terror supporter – and, courtesy of Netanyahu, a future respected member of the Israeli parliament. In Ben-Gvir’s mind, Goldstein is a hero.

The picture and accompanying verse played a symbolic role in the talks that led up to the agreement approved on Wednesday by the national-religious Habayit Hayehudi to create a “technical bloc” with Otzma Yehudit, also known as Meir Kahane’s fan club. One the leading rabbis of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, Yaakov Medan, a senior figure in the national-religious movement, said last week that the merger with the Kahane worshippers in Otzma would only be approved if Ben-Gvir took down the picture in the living room, with its biblical allusion to God’s favorite zealot, Pinheas.

Ben-Gvir refused, but the merger was approved nonetheless. The golden rule of politics, expediency before principles, won the day. Habayit Hayehudi head Rabbi Rafi Peretz, who took over after Bennett bolted the party several weeks ago, was told that if Otzma Yehudit ran independently, it would probably fall short of the 3.25 percent threshold and thus waste tens of thousands of right-wing votes. Such an outcome could harm the prospects for another right-wing victory and could consign Habayit Hayehudi and its more radical partner National Union to death by threshold as well. Worse, it would thwart Netanyahu’s grand design of using his probable election victory to browbeat his would-be accusers into submission and to continue his endeavors to demolish whatever remains of its open and liberal leanings.

Kahane, gunned down in New York in 1990 by an Al-Qaeda operative, must be smiling at Netanyahu from his grave. As a token of appreciation, the Brooklyn-born firebrand may emulate his loyal follower Ben-Gvir and put up a portrait of Netanyahu in the living room of his burial place at Jerusalem’s Har Hamenuchot cemetery. Instead of the biblical verse lauding Pinheas’ zealotry, Kahane could find an apt caption in the Talmudic saying “The work of the just is carried out by others,” with “others” in this case meaning the highest official in the Land of Israel.

4. Finally, it may be worthwhile noting that while Kahane has inspired legions of Israeli racists, his own political career in Israel in the mid-1980s was hampered not only by his odious ideology but also by his American ways and accent, which were too alien for most Israelis at the time. For much the same reason, however, Kahane is a relatively known entity to most American Jews, who are otherwise clueless about most Israeli politicians.

American Jews remember the Jewish Defense League set up by Kahane in 1968, a few years before his immigration to Israel, as well as his agitation for Soviet Jews and his collaboration with mafia don Joseph Colombo on behalf of “discriminated minorities.” When Kahane left America, American Jewry breathed a sigh of relief, bidding good riddance to a man they considered bad rubbish.

Now, a quarter of a century after Israel seemed to be banishing Kahane and his repulsive doctrines, American Jews were understandably shocked this week to see Netanyahu recycling the trash and promoting it as safe for consumption. The remnants of goodwill towards Netanyahu are now being consigned into the dumpster fire, into which Netanyahu has already chucked the bulk of his ties to liberal American Jews.

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1.6958862Thu, 21 Feb 2019 19:58:38JTA וMichelle HonigThu, 21 Feb 2019 19:23:08If you walk into any wealthy Jewish American neighborhood, a careful eye will spot designer duds — Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton — sported by well-coiffed men and women as they walk through town. But in a sea of expensive excess, one designer’s name is spoken with an air of reverence: Chanel.

It is a brand that can at once whisper and scream one’s bourgeois status. The boxy tweed jackets and white camellia flower pins are logo-less signatures that boldly state their coveted designer status without saying (or, in this case, embroidering or printing) a word.

It’s that unique mix of modesty and immodesty that makes Chanel a household name among Orthodox and secular Jewish women alike. Chanel provides bewigged and behatted Hasidic women with stiff, below-the-knee boucle skirt suits while simultaneously appealing to the languorous Long Island crowd with its less understated interlocked “CC” logo branded crop tops and chokers.

>> From Nazis to Churchill: The stink behind Chanel No. 5

But Chanel wasn’t always beloved by the upwardly mobile Jewish American elite. The namesake French founder Coco Chanel, despite her contributions to the development of modern fashion and luxury sportswear, was, as other writers have put it, a “wretched human being” and an “incorrigible anti-Semite.”

Not only was she in bed with the Nazi cause, but there is strong evidence to suggest she actively worked for the Nazis as a secret agent.

And yet it was a wealthy Jewish family, the Wertheimers, who helped finance her prolific rise and still control the company today. And it was Karl Lagerfeld, who died Tuesday at age 85, who has made the brand so iconic and polished that it was easy to forget everything problematic about Chanel herself.

Resentful of Jewish help

In 1924, the Wertheimer family provided financing to produce Chanel’s first and most iconic fragrance, Chanel No. 5, in exchange for a 70 percent share of the perfume division of her company. Theophile Bader, the Jewish businessman who introduced Chanel to Pierre Wertheimer at a racetrack, received an additional 20 percent as a finder’s fee, leaving just 10 percent for Chanel herself. Chanel was not involved in the production of the perfume, but she soon came to resent the agreement, both because of her latent anti-Semitism and the financial success of her perfume business. Chanel began trying to take back control of her company, unsuccessfully suing the family enough times that the Wertheimers reportedly had a lawyer dedicated solely to dealing with her litigious efforts.

Before the Nazis invaded France, the Wertheimers escaped to family in New York. Nazi laws forbade Jewish ownership of property and businesses, and in 1941, after Germany invaded France, Chanel petitioned the Vichy government and Nazi officials for sole ownership of her perfume company. But even that effort proved fruitless — the family, knowing Chanel’s obsessive desire to take control of her perfume business and the Nazi anti-Jewish laws that were already in effect in Germany, took steps to ensure that would never happen. The Wertheimers bequeathed full control of their stake to a French Christian businessman named Felix Amiot, himself a collaborator who sold arms to the Nazis, for the duration of the war.

Chanel, for her part, would go on to spend the rest of the war years as the lover of Nazi officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage. But she was more than just a passive paramour. According to journalist Hal Vaughan in his book “Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War,” there is evidence that Chanel was an active Nazi intelligence operative.

Despite her involvement with Nazis and her underhanded tactics to usurp the Wertheimers’ control of her company, about a decade after the war the Wertheimers — in a move that was part business, part turning the other cheek — helped Chanel re-establish the House of Chanel (which had ceased operations after the Allies invaded France and Chanel moved to Switzerland), even going as far as financing her daily living expenses and paying her taxes for the rest of her life.

It was in her unrepentant postwar years that Chanel really established what would become the design signature that Lagerfeld would later reinvent and recycle again and again until it became almost comically repetitive — the boucle jackets, the flat-topped wide brimmed hats, the pencil skirts and the pearls.

Following Chanel’s death in 1961, the brand languished, searching fruitlessly for an appropriate successor who could be trusted with continuing her legacy.

It was only in 1983 that a young Lagerfeld — by then already known as a fashion wunderkind — was tapped to head up the languishing Chanel house. He was chosen because of his acknowledged creative genius, as well as his innate understanding and respect for what Coco Chanel had created, and had proven his chops while establishing the heritage French brand Chloe as an “it” brand that embodied the bohemian sensibility of the early ’70s.

Tight and trashy

Lagerfeld’s first couture collection played on the tight-and-trashy look that was in vogue in Paris at that time — a trend Lagerfeld had helped shape before he was tapped to helm Chanel. The skirt suits were slimmer and sexier and worn with wide obi belts; evening dresses were flounced, tiered and topped with tulle boleros; gems were sewn onto a bodice as a trompe l’oeil of a necklace; white pique four-leaf clovers were pinned to the shoulders of suits.

This debut collection for Chanel received mixed reviews. Some believed the Chanel brand should have died with its founder, since she and her aesthetic were irreplaceable, while others thought that Lagerfeld’s touch paid proper homage that also showcased how he would shape the brand in the years to come.

It was the latter opinion that proved to be the most accurate.

That initial couture collection, with notes of verve and excitement usually reserved for ready-to-wear collections, was a success, setting in motion a lifetime contract with Chanel. Within a few seasons of his tenure, Chanel became the most exciting and coveted ticket at Paris Fashion Week. The shows were theatrical, the clothes were at once experimental and traditional; both fashion-forward and classic. Over the years, Chanel shows — mostly housed in Lagerfeld’s favored venue of choice, the Grand Palais — became grand productions where a runway could become a dreamy beach, a swanky airport, a French bistro and once even a supermarket in which every product bore the Chanel name and models carried grocery baskets edged in Chanel’s signature braided bag chain.

Under Lagerfeld, Chanel could appeal to a multitude of clients: old and young, staid and trendy. His expertise in taking the classic Chanel tropes, like the camellia and the tweed boucle, and reworking them into the trend of the day — whether that be logos or micro-minis — made the Lagerfeld name synonymous with Chanel. With his hauteur demeanor and rarely changing personal aesthetic — gloved hands, sunglasses even indoors and hair tied in a Beethoven-esque low pony — Lagerfeld wasn’t just the designer at Chanel; he was Chanel.

But Lagerfeld’s greatest service to the Chanel brand was his ability to erase the negative associations with Chanel, including the founder’s anti-Semitism. In fact, his contribution to the brand’s aesthetic and ethos was so extensive that his work often eclipses that of Coco Chanel herself. Many books written about the Chanel collections over the years often overlook the early years pre-Lagerfeld (much to the chagrin of Amazon book reviewers). Indeed it was only in recent years that the depth of Chanel’s involvement in Nazism has come to light. Lagerfeld made the brand so iconic and inclusive that it was easy to forget everything that was problematic about Chanel herself.

This isn’t to say that Lagerfeld hasn’t had his own brushes with anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. In 2017, he used the legacy of the Holocaust to attack German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy, saying, “You cannot kill millions of Jews and then take in millions of their worst enemies afterwards, even [after] decades.”

But what Lagerfeld created in the Chanel brand is so iconic, so overwhelmingly representative of wealth and luxury, so removed from controversy and politics (even a runway show dedicated to feminist slogans and protesting felt excessively bland because it lacked edge or controversy), that even Lagerfeld’s most problematic moments somehow got excused and pushed aside — that is the power of Lagerfeld’s Chanel.

But now that Lagerfeld is dead, the future of Chanel is again in peril: Who can replace a man who was such a virtuoso that he made Chanel into the most important, most recognizable brand — both in name and aesthetics — in fashion today? Let’s just hope that Chanel doesn’t languish for decades once more as the company searches for a designer who can respect and understand Lagerfeld’s vision, even as she or he remakes the brand in his or her image.

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1.6958872Thu, 21 Feb 2019 19:56:10Lee YaronThu, 21 Feb 2019 19:30:20Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority is preventing a British woman who landed in Israel on Wednesday to visit her domestic partner from entering the country, Haaretz has learned.

The Population and Immigration Authority said she was denied entry because she told airport personnel that she intended to remain in Israel and live with her partner, an asylum seeker from Somalia. For her part, the woman, Faiza Amin Mohammed, said she has not been given an explanation for being denied entry into Israel over the past two days, during which she has remained at Ben-Gurion International Airport. She denied any intention to remain in the country.

On Thursday, staff from the Population Authority, which is part of the Interior Ministry, tried unsuccessfully to put Mohammed on a flight back to Britain, efforts that she claimed included the use of force. A London resident who works in the hospitality and event sector, Mohammed is seeking to appeal the authority's decision but said she has not been allowed to meet with her lawyer, Asaf Weitzen.

She claimed that her intention was to pay a short visit to Israel to spend time with her partner and told Haaretz that she has no interest in living in Israel. She has been a British citizen for 20 years and has a business and children in England, she said.

Mohammed recounted that she met her partner in Somalia 20 years ago and reconnected with him about a year ago, and said their intention is to submit an asylum request for her partner in Britain. She noted that this is her second visit to Israel this year, having arrived in January and having left two weeks ago to tend to work obligations even though she had a three-month tourist visa.

“Indifference, racism and stupidity led to an offensive decision in my client’s case,” Weitzen said. “The Interior Ministry is showing contempt for the law, and not for the first time, and the ones who are suffering are those whose only sin is their Somali origin and the color of their skin. It’s no longer surprising, but it's still sad to rediscover what Israel has become.”

The Immigration Authority said in response: “The passenger landed in Israel two weeks after she had left, with the intention of living her with her partner, according to her. An examination of the facts revealed that her partner is a foreigner residing in Israel and no organized invitation was arranged [for Mohammed], as procedure requires. Under questioning, it turned out that she intends to settle in Israel even though she arrived with a tourist visa. Given all this, in addition to other facts, it was decided to refuse entry to Ms. Faiza Amin Mohammed.”

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1.6957799Thu, 21 Feb 2019 19:00:16Jonathan Lis, Chaim Levinson וJack KhouryThu, 21 Feb 2019 19:00:20The Labor Party will not merge with the left-wing Meretz party, its chairman Avi Gabbey said on Thursday, hours before deadline for the submission of party slates ahead of the April 9 election.

Meretz chair Tamar Zandberg said the two parties had a "historical opportunity to build a large left-wing party against the Likud-Kahanist government. Unfortunately, Gabbay claimed he didn't see the big chance and that there's a procedural difficulty within the Labor Party."

Meretz called on Thursday on the Labor Party to join forces after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's two biggest challengers, Hosen L'Yisrael's Benny Gantz and Yesh Atid's Yair Lapid, announced that they will run on a joint ticket in the election.

Labor in turn convened and decided to examine all possibilities "in order to ensure a political upheaval in Israel while maintaining the Labor Party's values."

Party sources said earlier that according to their analysis and recent polls, such a merger would not help either party as it would not increase the number of overall Knesset seats and as both parties will likely pass the electoral threshold on their own.

Sources said that the two parties have opened negotiations, however, to examine such a possibility.

By turning to Labor, Meretz was trying to both encourage Labor chairman Avi Gabbay to agree to a union and to ensure that it is not seen as the party responsible for blocking such a union in case the move fails.

"In light of the union on the center, it's time for a union on the left in order to establish a center-left government. Meretz will turn every stone to make this happen," the party's chairwoman, Tamar Zandberg, said Thursday morning. "We have 12 hours and we're inviting Avi Gabbay to the discussion table immediately."

Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich seconded Zandberg's comments, saying that the new political context necessitates "quickly and thoroughly examining the possibility of creating a joint bloc with Meretz. "Automatically refusing this would go down as in history as a day of infamy if the new situation would wipe out Meretz and cause Labor to crash," she said.

The chairman of the Labor caucus, MK Itzik Shmuli, said Thursday morning that "the connection between Gantz and Lapid is welcome because it promotes the chance to create a bloc that would halt the Kahanist-supported Netanyahu." Nonetheless, Shmuli added, "As was the case with [the now-defunct party headed by Tzipi Livni] Kadima, now, too we need Labor to be as strong as possible... so it can maximize the chance for a turnaround."

Meretz MK Esawi Freige echoed Zandberg's statement, saying: "Meretz and the Labor party should run together. On such days when Netanyahu brings the Kahanist craziness into the Knesset, when centrist parties treat the left like a curse, we cannot stand silent and act as if nothing has changed."

Freige was referring to the news that far-right party Habayit Hayehudi had accepted an offer from Netanyahu to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, a right-wing party led by followers of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, in exchange for the education and housing ministries in addition to two seats in the security cabinet.

The decision to run with the Kahanists on a joint ticket led number three on Habayit Hayehudi's slate, Yifat Erlich – a settler and former journalist with daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth who was preparing to run for the Knesset for the first time – to announce she was leaving the party.

Attempts to form a stronger bloc on the right

Meanwhile, on the right calls were made Thursday for Netanyahu to significantly expand the right-wing bloc in response to the Gantz-Lapid union. Netanyahu's options are limited, however, and may not increase the number of seats his bloc can get, especially since Yisrael Beiteinu and Hayamin Hehadash submitted their slates to the Central Elections Committee on Wednesday, meaning they would no longer be able to participate in any alliance.

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon's Kulanu party announced it would not join any party ahead of the election. "We at Kulanu plan on continuing and running by ourselves with no connections, no back-door deals, no work arrangements. We intend to run and keep serving the citiziens of the State of Israel in the next term as well," Kahlon said.

His party might suffer the biggest blow from the latest unions. Kahlon had previously declared he would not run together with any party, but the various alliances might eat away at his base and push him below the electoral threshold.

Orli Levi-Abekasis, who already announced Wednesday she would run independently after discussions with Gantz about a possible alliance, cannot join any existing party due to a sanction placed on her after she resigned from Yisrael Beiteinu. In an unlikely possibility, she could leave her Gesher slate so that Gesher could merge with Kulanu, as long as Kahlon promises to give her an exterior appointment if the merged parties join the coalition.

Future still unclear for Arab-majority parties

The four Arab-majority parties continue meanwhile to negotiate possible mergers after the Joint List, which ran on a joint slate in the previous election in 2015, disbanded in January when Ahmad Tibi withdrew Ta'al from the alliance. On Monday, two of the four parties, Balad and United Arab List, agreed to run on a joint slate.

On Thursday, Ta'al and Hadash agreed to run jointly as well. Hadash, led by Ayman Odeh, would receive the 1, 3, 5, 6 and 8 slots on the list, with Ta'al taking 2, 4, 7, and 9.

Party leadership would be shared by Odeh and Tibi. Issues such as who would lead the party's faction and committee appointments would be settled further down the line.

The Joint List was formed in 2014 after Israel raised the electoral threshold to 3.25 percent, making it likelier that individual parties representing Israel's Arab population could be shut out of the Knesset unless they allied with other parties. It is currently the third-largest bloc in the Knesset.

Separate runs would exacerbate the risk of the parties failing to pass the electoral threshold but the parties have been riven by mutual distrust, and, have been bracing to run separately amid mutual accusations.

Ta'al didn't show up at a meeting of the parties Wednesday night, scheduled to discuss a possible merger. The three parties continued the discussions without Ta'al, ending the meeting without any results. Ta'al has yet to submit its slate to the elections committee, meaning all options are still on the table. Ta'al is said to be negotiating with Hadash to run on a joint ticket.

On Thursday, Tibi rejected claims that he was responsible for foiling the negotiations, saying he had offered all the compromises and is also examining the option of running together with Hadash.

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1.6958527Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:51:16Gideon Levy וAlex LevacThu, 21 Feb 2019 18:51:07The road leading to the ruins of Homesh is strewn with rocks, concrete blocks, garbage and the remains of burned tires. An ominous silence hangs over the abandoned road, which supposedly leads nowhere. Alongside it are curbstones painted blue and white, which peek out from the refuse and are the only signs left of the northern West Bank settlement that was evacuated on August 23, 2005, during the Gaza disengagement almost 14 years ago. A water tower on the hilltop is the only structure still standing, but we didn’t manage to reach it during our trip to the site this week.

We sought to reach the ostensibly vacated Homesh to seek out the violent gang of so-called hilltop youth who swept down from there a few weeks ago and apparently had no qualms about attacking an elderly, helpless Palestinian shepherd of 71 from the nearby village of Burqa. They stoned him and were about to club him while he tended his flock peacefully on the slope of the hill belonging to his village. The rubble of Homesh lies on the summit. A rock struck the shepherd in the head; he collapsed, blood oozing from his wound, and briefly lost consciousness. He was hospitalized and had to undergo surgery.

The ascent to Homesh is scary. No one from Burqa dared join us, even though supposedly nothing prevents the locals from returning to their lands. The seizure order the Israel Defense Forces issued back in 1978 – calling for dispossession of the inhabitants and establishment of an outpost of the Nahal paramilitary brigade – was annulled in 2013. That followed a petition to the High Court of Justice filed in 2011 by the rights group Yesh Din on behalf of the Burqa council head and some villagers.

Thus, eight years after Homesh had been evacuated, the state informed the High Court that it was rescinding the seizure order. As far as is known, this was the first time the state announced that it was canceling such a directive, issued in regard to Palestinian lands in the West Bank for settlement purposes.

A few months later, in the summer of 2013, the closure order that had prohibited the Palestinians from accessing their lands was also annulled: The landowners were supposed to get their property back and be able to work the land again.

Back in May 2013, after the seizure order was revoked, we tried to reach the ruins of Homesh. As we approached, a group of masked individuals, two of them armed, darted out from the bushes menacingly; they eventually drove us off with shouts and threats. Someone who seemed to be their rabbi watched from a distance and didn’t lift a finger. Maybe he was proud of his violent pupils.

This week, after the incident with the elderly shepherd, we tried again to get to the evacuated settlement. Just before the last pile of rubble on the road, which we had to clear away to pass by, a young man emerged from the bushes wearing a white mask. Recalling our previous experience vividly, we quickly turned around and left.

Once more it was clear: Homesh was never evacuated.

A yeshiva called Homesh Hamehudeshet (Renewed Homesh) was established on the site about 12 years ago, headed by Rabbi Elishama Cohen, though it’s not known whether it still operates on a regular basis. The years following the evacuation saw mass pilgrimages to the site, marches and demonstrations, ritual ceremonies and assemblies, in the presence of cabinet ministers, MKs and rabbis. The last such event was the inauguration of a Torah scroll last June. No one stopped them. Between one pilgrimage and the next, a group of “hilltop youth” remain at the site, possibly from the nearby settlement of Shavei Shomron or from the violent settlement of Yitzhar.

According to Dror Etkes, an expert on settlements and the founder of Kerem Navot – an NGO that researches and monitors land-use policy in the West Bank [full disclosure: Haaretz photographer Alex Levac is a member of Kerem Navot's executive board] – the young settlers who are currently squatting on or near Homesh land (perhaps in caves or temporary dwellings, it was impossible to verify) are unruly and particularly dangerous. Etkes too was attacked by them several years ago. During the bad winter weather, the site is meagerly populated and probably empty at night. But in general, residents of Burqa are living under the threat of a group of ruffians who have seized the hill above their village. Over the years, not one Palestinian has ever gotten an inch of his land back.

In response to a query about why the army doesn’t expel the intruders, the IDF Spokesman’s Office said: "A demarcation order has been imposed on the area where Homesh formerly existed that prohibits any individual from entering except by authorization of a commanding officer. The IDF enforces this order based on assessments of the situation there and on information concerning illicit activities taking place at the site. Permission to allow Palestinians to enter will be considered in light of land ownership claims and security considerations."

From the front door of his home, shepherd Mufid Shakehr Abu Hussein gazes fearfully at the hill looming above, forbidding and foreboding. The intruders could be spotted lurking behind a row of trees. Since the violent assault he suffered in December he hasn’t dared graze his flock on the hillside pasture land. Dozens of sheep and goats are locked in the pen in the yard of an adjacent structure, a centuries-old stone ruin. Burqa should be a heritage site instead of a poverty-stricken, partially neglected village that lives in fear of settler terror.

Mufid and his wife Yusra, 64, have eight children. He speaks Hebrew from the days when he built homes in Ramat Aviv, an upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood. “Good place, Ramat Aviv, near the university,” he says. “Do you know it’s also called Sheikh Munis?” – a reference to the Palestinian village on whose ruins Tel Aviv University stands.

December 26, a Wednesday, is etched deeply in Abu Hussein’s memory. As every day, he set out at about 8 A.M. with his sheep and goats, guiding them up the steep road to where the grazing land is. He’s in good shape, climbing up there every morning, using a wooden staff to lean on and to prod the animals, returning home at midday.

He was also attacked four years ago by Homesh hooligans, he tells us now: As he watched over his flock on the hill, six young people lurched out of the rubble with shouts and started hitting the animals. They tried to beat him as well, but he warded them off with his staff and ran for his life, leaving the flock behind. Returning an hour and a half later, he found that the thugs had killed two sheep and made off with a third. Since then, he says, he has had no problems.

The weather was fine on December 26, and he took his usual route. The sheep scattered to graze. At about 10 A.M., Abu Hussein recalls, 10 young people suddenly rushed down from the summit. They had long curls and wore small hats, he says, adding that he didn’t notice if any of them were armed. Three of them, about 25 years old he thinks, got about a meter and a half [5 feet] from him and tried to attack him with clubs, but he fended them off with his staff. Others in the group urged them on: “Hit him! Hit him!” A volley of stones rained down from high up on the hill, one of them striking the shepherd in the head. He fell to the ground and blacked out for a few minutes.

The settlers fled; Abu Hussein says he’s certain they ran off because they thought they had killed him. After about five minutes he regained consciousness and saw his bloodstained clothes. Somehow he got up and started to make his way down, toward his house. In the meantime, the sheep, scared off by the hail of stones, fled toward their pen.

Yusra, seeing the flock return without the shepherd, was seized by panic and rushed out, finding her husband slowly descending, bleeding from his head. She helped him get home and called their son Amar, the principal of a local school, who called a taxi to take his father to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where he underwent surgery.

The medical report by the Palestinian Health Ministry states that Abu Hussein suffered serious skull fractures. He was hospitalized in intensive care for two days and spent another two days in a regular ward before being discharged.

About a week later, he began to suffer from convulsions and a tingling sensation in his left leg; he was hospitalized again for four days. Since then, he has been taking medication to control the convulsions but is experiencing dizzy spells. Two months after the incident, Abu Hussein doesn’t dare return to the hill. “I’m afraid,” he says. With no one else to tend the flock – his children all work – the only solution is a very expensive one: procuring food somehow, and feeding the animals in the pen. When will you go back to pasturing the animals? “When I feel better, I’m going back.”

On January 15, he filed an assault complaint with the Ariel police department. “Form confirming submission of a complaint, Samaria Police in Ariel, File No. 22313/2019: The charge: Assault causing actual bodily harm. Level: Misdemeanor. Date of start of event: Jan. 5, 2019. Date of end of event: Jan. 5, 2019.” The incident, we recall, occurred on December 26, 2018. The intensive investigation is still proceeding apace.

Abu Hussein also submitted a complaint to the Palestinian police, but they have no authority regarding settlers.

We walked to his pasture land, on the slope of the hill. It’s only about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from his house, but it’s a very steep ascent, dotted with sheep droppings. On one side is the pasture, on the other the cemetery of one of the village clans. Abu Hussein was wounded next to the oak tree. Everything around it is verdant now, full of life.

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1.6958756Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:45:14David RosenbergThu, 21 Feb 2019 18:03:25When Israelis, or for that matter anybody else, thinks of Lebanon they think of Hezbollah and maybe the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees Lebanon is hosting. A better way to think of the country is to think of trash.

Garbage is piling up in illegal landfills, being burned in open fields, and dumped in the Mediterranean, fouling the country’s coastal water. That is because four years after a crisis that led to mounds of trash accumulating on the streets of Beirut and the “You stink” protests, the government did absolutely nothing to address the problem, leaving private contractors to fill the void with nary an ecological standard in their way.

Normally a problem as in-your-face as garbage would spur a government to action. Unlike tackling a housing crisis or a budget deficit, voters can see a garbage crisis. Ecological disaster by garbage is easy to understand, and a solution is visible even to the most uninformed voter. It’s pure pothole politics and a politician who addresses it can expect to be rewarded at election time.

But that’s not the way things work in Lebanon. The perennial garbage crisis demonstrates why the even more severe crisis of the economy teetering on the edge of a debt cliff isn’t likely to get attention either. As improbable as it may seem, that could bring Israel to a clash with Hezbollah that neither side particularly wants.

But first, the economy. Lebanon has been in an economic funk for years, with GDP growth running at a pitiful 1% to 2% annually since 2011. The war in Syria next door is the proximate cause. It has hurt the banking and tourism industries that are the mainstay of the economy. It has also flooded Lebanon with as many as 1.5 million refugees – one for every four Lebanese, the highest per capita ratio in the world.

Meanwhile, debt has been piling up to an estimated 140% of GDP, the third-highest level in the world, and that doesn’t count the debt of state-owned entities like the dysfunctional electric power monopoly. In January , Moody’s downgraded Lebanon’s rating to Caa1.

The rating agency politely describes Lebanon’s debt as “speculative” and ‘high risk,” but since the subject is trash, let it be known that in common parlance the rating means Lebanese debt has been deemed junk.

What has kept Lebanon afloat is deposits made by diaspora Lebanese into local banks. But even that source of funds is shrinking as expats growing increasingly uneasy about keeping their money in banks located in what looks increasingly like a failed state.

Vote for the trashman

Lebanon’s new government, which took office at the end of January, has pledged to give top priority to the economy and take steps to reduce the budget deficit by one percentage point a year over the next five years.

But don’t take any of this as anything more than posturing. A group of donor nations agreed last April to provide $11.5 billion in aid, mostly in the form of loans, to help Lebanon, but made it conditional on economic reforms. Lebanon took Step 1 in the process by promising better behavior.

The pledge for change came from Prime Minister Saad Hariri, but his power to govern is subordinate to Hezbollah, which controls parliament. And, even Hezbollah doesn’t call all the shots.

Unfortunately, the old chestnut about Lebanese politics being a game of divvying up power and privilege among its multiple religious sects remains true today. Hariri’s government is an unwieldy 30 ministers for a population of just four million people and it took no less than nine months to form as the politicians fought over who would get what.

In the end, the cabinet line-up is pretty much made up of the same power brokers who were in the last government. They didn’t address the trash and economy issue before and felt no urgency over nine months to form a government that could, despite the obvious urgency.

Meantime, Lebanon’s government has effectively ceded its powers to private actors. The military is in the hands of Hezbollah, which has more fire power than the army. But so are a lot of other state functions, for example garbage.

Since the state isn't removing the trash, the job has been taken over by private contractors usually affiliated with a political party, who get rid of the waste whichever way they can, including just dumping into the sea, burning it, or creating illegal landfills.

Mistrustful of the system, instead of voting for a party or politician who will get the government itself to remove trash, you vote for the party that is actually providing the service now.

The politicians, who are making money on the side out of providing state services privately, have little incentive to change things.

One way the deadlock created by patronage politics could be broken is a nice little round of fighting with Israel. As the acknowledged power behind the throne, Hezbollah is the likely candidate to take the rap for Lebanon’s descent into economic and environmental hell.

I doubt Hezbollah is so cynical and casually risk-averse to employ a “wag the dog” strategy by goading Israel into a destructive conflict, even if it thinks the ensuing destruction might unlock aid money. However, it’s easier to imagine that as the pressures mount, Hezbollah looks for a distraction on the border in expectation that Israel doesn’t really want war and will respond with restraint.

If that sounds eerily similar to the miscalculation that led to the Second Lebanon War, remember that history has a way of repeating itself.

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1.6958545Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:27:17Michael J. Koplow Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:27:06Amidst a growing crisis with Poland over Israeli comments about its culpability in the Holocaust and preparations for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Israeli efforts to curtail Iranian activities in Syria, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent Tuesday and Wednesday dealing with what he viewed as a far more pressing matter: ensuring the political survival of Israel’s most prominent racist and anti-democratic party.

Netanyahu’s pleading, cajoling, and promises of future political power were all aimed at sealing a merger between HaBayit HaYehudi and the Jewish supremacist Otzma Yehudit, the latter being the descendant of Meir Kahane’s banned terrorist organization Kach.

With polling showing HaBayit HaYehudi hovering at the threshold for entering the Knesset and Otzma Yehudit below it, Netanyahu was afraid that rightwing votes would be wasted, making it harder for him to assemble a coalition and remain prime minister in the next government.

So after promising HaBayit HaYehudi two ministries and a spot on the Likud list itself, Netanyahu convinced the party to run jointly with Otzma Yehudit, thereby making Netanyahu’s continued residence in Balfour Street more secure.

Much of the condemnation of Netanyahu’s embrace and enabling of Otzma Yehudit has focused on the distinctly unflattering picture it paints of a leader willing to stand next to the equivalent of Israel’s KKK for naked domestic political gain.

All of that criticism is entirely deserved, and it does indeed speak volumes about Netanyahu and anyone who else who agrees to sit in a coalition that rests on the shoulders of Israelis who were part of a designated terrorist group, who openly glorify the mass murdering terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who call for expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel who refuse to sign loyalty oaths, and who campaign for the exclusion of non-Jews from the public sphere.

But aside from the rank odiousness of what Netanyahu has just done, there is another variable to this that should not escape notice, which is that Netanyahu has also just damaged one of Israel’s most valuable national security assets.

As both supporters and opponents of Israel well know, one of Israel’s most potent claims on the world stage is that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. Netanyahu and Israeli government officials dating back to the state’s founding have touted this fact as a reason to support Israel against its regional adversaries.

Particularly when it comes to the U.S.-Israel relationship, Israel’s popularity among American policymakers and the American people has been driven – contrary to Ilhan Omar’s assertion about the influence of pro-Israel money – more than anything else by the notion of shared liberal values and a common democratic culture.

As Israel has dealt with objections to its embrace of rightwing nationalist governments in Europe, it has been able to deflect that criticism by pointing out that Israel itself does not exhibit those values.

As the BDS movement has gained more traction on the left, with two members of Congress who for the first time support it, Israel has successfully pointed out the absurdity of singling out the one democracy in the Middle East while authoritarian abusers of human rights abound throughout the region.

And most prominently, when Israel is criticized for its actions in the West Bank, it quickly points to the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel have full rights and a better situation than they would in any Arab country.

In other words, Israeli democracy and liberalism are not only a benefit to Israelis who enjoy the freedoms they afford, but benefit Israel’s foreign relations and its global security.

Netanyahu’s frenzied actions designed to boost a racist, neo-fascist party made up of anti-Arab activists whose previous political vehicle was banned by Israel’s Supreme Court and is internationally designated as a terrorist organization – and to explicitly promise that it will be part of any government he forms after the election – damages Israel on every front mentioned above.

Any American who questions whether Israel does indeed still exhibit an ironclad commitment to liberal values will be on newly solid ground.

Europeans who worry about Israel’s continued protections for its non-Jewish minority citizens now have proof that Netanyahu is willing to welcome the ugliest form of xenophobic supremacist thought right alongside him in Israel’s halls of power.

Anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic BDS activists now have an actual data point for their argument that Israel is an unrepentant racist state.

When the Israeli government points to Palestinian Authority incitement to terrorism as a grave national security threat, supporting measures in the U.S. to combat Palestinian terrorism incitement such as the Taylor Force Act and enacting its own law to withhold PA tax revenues, its argument is now a lot more hollow having moved to incorporate its own terrorists into its ranks.

Whether or not Otzma Yehudit manages to get more than one Knesset seat or move the needle one inch on Israeli policy is irrelevant; Netanyahu’s tacit alliance with them destroys Israel’s position on the moral high ground in incalculable way.

In an effort to save his own kingdom, Netanyahu is wantonly trampling not only his own public image but Israel’s as well. The gambit may work as a political tactic, but it comes at great cost to Israel’s strategic position in the world.

For those who are accustomed to boasting of Israel’s impeccable moral standing, it may be time to start formulating some new arguments.

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1.6958457Thu, 21 Feb 2019 18:16:51Steven KleinThu, 21 Feb 2019 15:59:18SCALING THE ‘HEIGHTS’: Before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s monster success “Hamilton,” there was “In the Heights,” which tells the story of Hispanic immigrants in New York. Between next Thursday and March 9, Starcatcher will present the show in Jerusalem. Director and designer Eli Kaplan-Wildmann told Haaretz the show is particularly relevant in Jerusalem “because we are a community of either immigrants or kids of immigrants, and it is really cool to be able to identify with and find the differences with our stories.” Kaplan-Wildmann, who moved to Israel as a child but later went back to New York, where he studied design and worked on Broadway, said the huge cast is dealing with new kinds of dance like hip-hop, breakdancing and salsa. “They have proven to be up to the task,” he added. The lead actors include Shimi Herman, a new immigrant from Miami, Maya Kristal Tenembaum, Shir Arbiv and Yair Farkas. For more info, visit: https://www.beitshmuel.co.il/In_The_Heights

JERUSALISM IN JERUSALEM: Next Wednesday, Jerusalism – which fosters the local literary community in Jerusalem – will present Haim Watzman’s “Necessary Stories: Between Worlds” at the Harmony Cultural Center. The play is based on stories from the regular column he began writing at the Jerusalem Report over a decade ago. “My actress friend Annabelle Landgarten three years ago had read one of the stories and said, ‘This really needs to be on stage,’” the Washington-raised Watzman told Haaretz. “I was delighted to hear that, because when I was at Duke I wrote plays. I do tend to write and see the characters on the stage,” he added. The show is now enjoying its third annual edition. Landgarten, from London, and Jane Golbert, who hails from New York, will perform the stories along with Watzman. There will be a discussion with Watzman following the performance, which commences at 8 P.M. For tickets, search “necessary stories” and “Jerusalem” at www.eventbrite.com.

Have an idea about an item for Rank and File? Email us at: column@haaretz.co.il

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1.6956850Thu, 21 Feb 2019 17:53:21Hilo GlazerThu, 21 Feb 2019 17:52:58‘It took time to get one of my brothers to join me. I filled his head with ideas.’

S., 37, aided by his brother, stabbed his 34-year-old sister to death on her wedding day. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he’s been in jail since 2008

“I grew up in a city in the Triangle region [of Arab communities in central Israel]. My father was a factory foreman and a partner in the family business; my mother, a housewife. Ours wasn’t a religious family and not especially conservative. Everyone decided what to work in and what to study. We were seven siblings – four girls and three boys. I was the youngest, but I wasn’t the little boy who’s pampered and hugged. Just the opposite. When I made a mistake, I knew I shouldn’t bother coming home, that I’d be better off sleeping in the street, because if I went back I’d be walloped by my father. Over time, I realized it was more complicated. That this was my father’s approach – that he was in charge and I needed to be under his wing. I never dared look him in the eye. We would talk and I would be staring at the floor.

“The whole load and all the expectations were on me. That’s usually the role of the eldest, but my father always pushed me into that place. He thought that if control were in my hands, the house would be in a good place. He made a mistake.

“Eventually, I found myself managing things. Seeing to my brothers when they wanted to marry, promoting the family business, helping my parents when they got older. Everyone knew they could count on me, in the immediate family and also in the extended one. Very quickly, I rose to the top of the pyramid.

“My sister was five years older than me. Among the seven siblings we were the closest. She also worked for me as a secretary in the business for many years. My best memory of her is from when I got engaged. She came to me and said, ‘No matter how much money you need for the engagement and for the party – it’s on me.’ She was generous to me and helped me, and I ended up a traitor.

“She herself got engaged at a relatively late age, 34. She chose someone whom I knew, and whom I found unacceptable. A problematic guy, a former junkie. I tried to talk to her, but it didn’t help. She warned me that if I tried to separate them, she would elope with him.

“I was the only one in the family who was against that marriage. So it’s sort of strange to say that what I did was an ‘honor’ killing. Because no one in the immediate family asked me to restore the family honor. But I had bigger interests, in the extended family. At that moment, I felt that those interests would be hurt by the marriage, that it would cause me big losses. I wanted to stay at the top of the pyramid, and it’s impossible to hold on to that place when you’re humiliated. My feeling was that if she married him, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.

“I didn’t hesitate for even a second. At that moment I had no alternative. Even so, it took me a little time to persuade one of my brothers to join me. I gave him proof, I filled his head with ideas so that he would also be angry at her.

“We murdered her an hour and a half before the wedding, in our house. She was just finishing her preparations for the event, and the groom’s family was on the way. We stabbed her with a knife. We decided beforehand that my brother would take responsibility for the act and I would look after him from the outside, because I’m better connected when it comes to work and having an economic base. After my sister was taken to the hospital, and after she died, he went to the police station and turned himself in. The thing is that there were witnesses who said that if I hadn’t been in the picture, he wouldn’t have been capable of doing it. At that stage, I still thought that I would be able to get away with it. Even when I was caught I didn’t confess.

“I was sentenced to life, but I wouldn’t accept it. I fought for my innocence, I appealed, I got all the way to the Supreme Court. When I was told that the appeal had not been accepted, I said to myself: There is justice. For four years I wouldn’t admit to the offense, but at some point it became too much, I couldn’t carry the lie anymore. When I joined a therapeutic group, in prison, at the age of 28, I learned for the first time what emotion is. Things began coming to the surface.

“The first person I confessed to was my wife. When I told my mother, she said she had a feeling I was involved, but at some level she didn’t want to believe. My father is the only one who to this day I haven’t found the strength to talk to about it. His health and his emotional condition won’t allow me to. But he knows, and a few times on the phone he said he hopes God will forgive me. I’m also in telephone contact with my brother who did the murder with me [and has been incarcerated also since 2008]. I have asked him many times to forgive me.

“With the extended family, it’s different. One of the uncles praises me to this day and tells me, ‘Well done,’ for what I did. We talked about half a year ago, I told him that today I understand that it was a mistake.

“The hardest thing was telling the kids. The oldest, my 13-year-old son, knew from a very young age why his father was in jail. People said things to him on the street, in school, he was exposed to a lot of humiliation. A year ago, I asked that my son be allowed to make a special visit, and I explained to him exactly what happened, that it shouldn’t have happened, that I made a mistake.

“In prison, I have met people who were doing time for the same reason. Ninety percent of them say that other people pushed them, that they had taken so much humiliation and so much violence in life that they didn’t have a choice. That’s not the case with me. There was no outside influence. It’s all me and only me. That’s why today I say that the murder I committed wasn’t for the family’s honor – it was murder for my own honor. In general, I would like everyone who has committed an ‘honor killing’ to look inside himself and think about what his real motive was. There is no such thing as family honor. That’s false. The Koran doesn’t say anywhere that you have to murder.

I don’t know yet when I’ll get out, but when it happens, I’ll have no problem going to all the mosques and shouting through the loudspeaker: I did it and I was wrong. Three years ago, I heard about a woman from my area whose brothers were planning to murder her. She was someone who really did make a mistake: She cheated, left home, ran off with another man. I asked my wife to take this on, and we hid her at our place. At first she didn’t believe that I wanted to help her. She said to me: “You? Who committed murder himself?” I told her to test me. She was with us for a year and a half. And people knew, threatened me. For some reason they didn’t have courage to cross the line of my house and take her. Today she’s free, with another child and pregnant. Maybe I did some sort of tikkun [correction] there.

‘I felt that I didn’t want to do the murder. My brother called with shouts and threats’

H., 27. When he was 17, he was asked by his older brother to murder that brother’s 20-year-old partner. He stabbed her to death in her apartment. He is scheduled for release in 2026.

“I grew up in the Bedouin ‘diaspora’ [communities in the south not recognized by Israel's government]. My father was married to three women, and we were 23 siblings altogether. He died when I was 2, and I don’t remember anything about him. I went through a very violent childhood from my brothers. Every one of them who was older than me, even by a day, had authority over me and could tell me what to do: Go, come, sit, come back, go to sleep, get up. And I couldn’t say no. I had no standing at home, I gave up on myself. I lived in fear.

“In school, I behaved violently in order to show who I was, so the kids would know they couldn’t get the better of me. I behaved violently with my cousins, too. I envied them for the things they had at home and I didn’t: clothes, shoes, games, a schoolbag. My bag was always smelly and torn.

“At that time, my older brother was in a relationship with a divorced girl, someone from outside the family. He lived with her in the city. One day he phones and tells me that they had separated, because she took his money, because she cheated on him. That was the brother I was the most afraid of, the one who was the most violent with me. And suddenly he’s talking to me like that and there’s a feeling of closeness between us. I start to feel appreciated by him, that he respects me, is giving me what I need. I didn’t know what the reason for the change was.

“After some time he called again. He told me it’s his honor [at stake], that there was no way to keep silent about the fact that she was going out with someone else, and he asked me to do the murder. He said, “You’re a minor, not yet 17, you won’t even get life, you’ll do a few years and go home.” He filled my head that way, with all kinds of arguments. And I took on his character, I walked around with both the feeling of honor and of the cheating. I started to feel like it was my situation, and that made it possibile for me to take the responsibility onto myself.

“In the meantime, my brother went abroad and I came to his wife’s house. Three times I stood outside her door, and three times I went home. Deep down, I felt that I didn’t want to do this murder. And each of these times, my brother would then call me with shouts and threats. It was important for me to please him, to prove that I could do anything, to show him that I was no longer the guy who gets stepped on, who’s humiliated, who’s ignored at home. I wanted him to see my manliness.

“A fourth time, I came and stood outside her door, and this time I broke it down. The woman was standing there. I was so afraid that I didn’t even look at her, I took the knife and started to stab, I don’t even know where. I had never met her before. The first time I saw her was when I killed her. Her daughter from her previous marriage was there, too, a 2-year-old. I put the girl in another room and shut the door, so she wouldn’t see her mother like that. After that I left the house fast.

“After a week the police caught me. I wasn’t surprised. I knew I was going to jail, it was worth it to me for the honor. During my first days after being arrested, I felt that I could rest at last, forget it all. But then I started imagining scenes from the murder, and I couldn’t get them out of my head. I started to understand where I was, what I did.

“Since then, my brother has remained abroad. He didn’t say thank you, but he did call to ask if I needed things, if I was short of anything in jail. It took a number of years before I got to a situation where I could open up and tell him that I was angry with him. He was silent. He had no words.

“The rest of my family was in shock over what I did, they didn’t even know about my brother’s relationship. My mother was really angry at me, because this was the second such case with us, and she knows what it can do to the family. She had a relative, 20-something years old with two children, who was seen hitchhiking and was murdered because there was a rumor that she was going with another man. This had been three or four years earlier, and my mother went into a depression from it. After my case, her condition deteriorated even more, also medically. With us, the women are afraid, they keep silent. They see everything with their eyes, but they have no say, they have no worth.

“My mother is still angry, but she visits, she helps, brings me snacks. The other brothers have jobs, family. At first, they also visited, but lately they don’t have time. I met a woman through her father, who was with me here in prison. We got married last year. I’ll soon start getting furloughs.

‘I took the knife from the kitchen and went straight to her room’

T., 25. When he was 15, his father induced him to murder his 20-year-old sister. T. stabbed her to death in her bed, slitting her throat. He is scheduled for release in 2026.

“I grew up in a city in the territories. There were nine of us. Dad, Mom, six boys and my sister. She was the oldest. She didn’t know how to read or write, nor could I and my mother, but she had an interest that she would always share with me: She wanted to learn how to be a cosmetician. One time she talked about how she would like to go to a course, and my father refused. Talking to him was hard for her.

“I’m the middle child. I started working when I was 11. First in renovations, in restaurants and in hotels. My last job before getting arrested was in a meat plant. My father didn’t work, only my mother, and I had to help them. My father would hit us all, me too, and also my sister. It all started when he said that there were rumors about my sister. Because of that we moved to a different city, to start a new life.

“I wasn’t home much then, I was always working, and I also had a room at work where I could sleep. One day my father called, and said, ‘Your sister’s run away from home, come back now.’ I get on a bus, and when I get to the neighborhood, I see the kids coming back from school, and I think to myself that everyone probably already heard about what happened in our home. I started to feel angry at my sister. When I got there, my father told me that she run off, and was at a home for battered women. We found out that she called my mother from there. My sister had experienced serious violence from my father. She wanted to put an end to it, to stop the problems. But in the neighborhood, people didn’t know any of that. The rumor was that she had run off with a man.

“I asked my father what had happened. He said, ‘I hit her one night, and in the morning we couldn’t find her.’ A few days later, my mother persuaded her to come back, on condition that my father would guarantee in writing that nothing would happen to her. So, in fact, he went to the police with my two older brothers and he signed that if something were to happen to her, it’s their responsibility. She came back, and we went on living like usual, but the rumor was still floating around that she was actually in Haifa, that she had gone off with a man. That’s how it got around. Word of mouth. From outside it looks like things were normal, but within the home there was a lot of anger, especially at her. People on the street also started to making remarks. It was with me all the time.

“One day my father asked me to come and sit with him, he and I were the only ones who were home. He said to me, ‘You know how much I think of you, trust you, love you, and now I need your help.’ Fifteen years, I don’t hear from him, and suddenly, at that moment, when he said those things, I couldn’t think about anything else. He went on, ‘Listen, we can’t bear the rumors anymore, we have to put an end to it.’ I asked him what exactly he wanted me to do. He answered, ‘Finish it, you know how.’”

I couldn’t sleep all night. I remember looking at the clock and seeing that it was 5:02. Everyone went to work, but I didn’t. My body started to shake, my hands became sweaty. I took a knife from the kitchen and went straight to her room. When it was over I changed my clothes and went to sit in the yard. My father came back after he had driven my brothers [to work], and I told him that I had done it. He asked, ‘What did you do?’ I said, ‘I killed my sister.’ He looked at me in this way, from top to bottom, and then he went to the neighbors and said, ‘The boy killed his sister.’

“When I got to the police station in Taibeh, I told myself this was it, this would be my life from now on and this is where it will end. I decided that I wasn’t going to talk to anyone and no one would talk to me. Seven years I stayed closed inside myself.

“One day my brother called and told me I had a new niece. I asked what her name was. He said, ‘We thought about naming her for our sister, but we didn’t want you to be angry.’ I said that it was the other way around, that if they didn’t give her that name, I would be angry. They started to bring the girl on visits, and that warmed my heart, it started to wake up things I didn’t know I had inside me.

“After the event, my mother divorced my father. With me, she didn’t break off relations. I would call, ask how things were, everything’s okay, and we would hang up. Gradually I started to ask her things about herself – ‘What did you do today? What’s happening with you?’

“Not long ago they showed the movie ‘Women of Freedom’ [a 2016 documentary by Abeer Zeibak Haddad, a Nazareth-born actress and director, about so-called ‘honor killings’] in our block. There was a scene of a mother who comes to clean her daughter’s grave. That broke me. I could feel for her. It was like I could see my mother in the body of that woman. Cleaning the grave, talking to my sister, one on one. I sat in a corner of the room and started to cry.

“My mother visits my sister’s grave three times a year – at Ramadan, at Eid al-Fitr and on the anniversary of her death. She goes to the grave and stays next to it all night. I made a rule for myself not to call her on those days, because I know that when she leaves the cemetery, she [comes home and] goes straight to sleep. I never had the courage to cry in front of my mother. She was here a week ago, a few days after she was with her. On the one hand, she visited her girl in the grave, on the other hand she visited her boy in prison. She sat next to me and I felt that we were having a conversation through our eyes, without even speaking. After she left, I called her and told her that I felt her pain. She told me, ‘Nine years I waited to hear that from you, I am happy that at last something is happening within you.’ I am supposed to get out in another eight years. My dream is to strengthen the ties with my mother and to raise a family.

“My father is also doing a life term for the murder. We were kind of cut off from each other until I started to get messages through people in the prison that he wanted to talk to me. So we would talk here and there, but without any emotion. Once, I plucked up my courage and said to him, ‘Why did you take a 15-year-old boy and tell him to do something like that? Why did you push me to do it?’ The conversation went on half an hour, mostly shouts, from both sides. He said to me, ‘You also lived in it, whether it in the home, or outside it, it was known that it would end like that.” He explained to me that he didn’t want my brothers to do it, because I was a minor, and as a minor I wouldn’t get a long prison term. I felt that I didn’t want to hear his voice."

Making a murderer

July 2018, Rimonim Prison, a maximum-security facility near Netanya. The inmates in the unit for the treatment of domestic-violence criminals meet for their weekly conversation with the unit’s director, Capt. Maya Ofgang, a social worker in the Israel Prison Service. In the previous meeting the inmates watched “Women of Freedom,” and now Ofgang asks them to share their thoughts about the film. The first to ask for the floor is someone who’s been incarcerated for 17 years for murdering his sister and only recently joined the therapeutic program.

“When the movie started, all I wanted was to get up and leave,” he relates. “Since then, I can hear my sister telling me, ‘Don’t murder me.’ A second inmate, who also murdered his sister, rejects the “family honor” concept. ‘It wasn’t like that with me,’ he says. ‘I was frustrated in my life, and I thought the only way to get things was by violence. With my sister, I felt a little insecure. She had joie de vivre, friends, she knew things, and I was closed, shy.”

The unit’s professionals also object to the term “family honor”; they prefer “culturally based murder.”

“There is no dynamic here of father, mother and two children, but a family system which is effectively a ramified political mechanism,” Ofgang told me when we spoke after the group session. “When the structure is a father, three wives and dozens of children, the tension among the wives also becomes important – questions such as who the youngest wife is and who was the first one, and whether the boys are full brothers or half-brothers. Sometimes, in the admission interview, when prisoners are asked how many siblings they have, they might reply, ‘Six brothers and my sister.’ In other words, the woman isn’t counted.”

According to another social worker in the unit, Capt. Ayala Afek, everyone has a role in the family mechanism, including the mother. “Even if the mother all but ignored them in childhood, it’s hard for them to be angry with her,” Afek says. “They believe she was a good mother, warm, who had no prior knowledge of the murder. As a result of that binary approach, they are deeply split about what makes a ‘good woman’ and a ‘bad woman.’”

Ofgang, asked to describe the profile of this sort of killer, says, “Men who themselves underwent violence, who were silenced in their childhood, who never learned how to express feelings, whose emotional range is very narrow and who tend to deal a lot with the dynamic of power relations. Their attack on the daughter of the family is cold, planned and calculated. There is something more restrained and reserved about it, as compared to manifestations of impulsive violence, which are characteristic of inmates who harmed their partners.”

How is a person convinced to murder his sister?

Afek: “You create a story for them. The sister did such and such, it’s ruining the family, and the only way to save us from destruction is for you to do this killing.”

Ofgang: “There is a mechanism of those who send and those who are sent – the envoys, who are called on to commit the murder in practice. The envoys are usually young, in some cases minors. It’s explained to them what to be angry about, they’re oriented in that direction. From the distance of time they can look at their sister as a subject, but at the time she is totally an object for them. That’s why many of them talk about an experience of disconnect.”

Most of the men who spoke with Haaretz in fact described a pattern in which they were coaxed to commit the murder by older relatives. Samah Salaime, founder of the NGO Na’am: Arab Women in the Center, which assists Arab women who are victims of violence, has also noticed that very often, the brother who assumes most of the responsibility is the weak link in the family. “In crime families too they take the youngest son and sacrifice him,” she says, based on 20 years’ experience working with women victimized by violence in Lod and Ramle. “But it’s not only a matter of age. Many times the brother who takes the blame for the murder is the weakest and most ostracized in the family, the one that wants to be accepted into the family gang. The murder is a kind of initiation rite into this elite.”

Salaime, too, is opposed to the term “honor killing,” because “the honor is only an excuse, a kind of garbage can into which all kinds of men’s justifications for being in control of or harming the women around them can be tossed.” In the Bedouin community, she adds, “the bar for affronting ‘honor’ is seemingly lower, because the woman comes from a traditional society, though in crime families it’s different. The women in those families can usually be what they want, the important thing is not to be an informer or be suspected of collaborating with the police. They can go out with men and, you know, ‘affront honor.’ Bisan Abu Ghanem [who was murdered in Ramle in 2014] was a well-groomed woman, a kind of beauty queen who was divorced twice, and none of it bothered her family. The line was crossed when the family suspected that she was divulging secrets. And then suddenly, ‘honor’ was whipped out, which in practice prepared the way for her murder.”

Said Tali, the national inspector on domestic violence in the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, discerns geographical differences as well. “There is more violence in the Bedouin community, and the oppression is more intense, but there has actually been a decline in the number of murder cases there,” Tali says. “The further north we go, the more women there are who question the old order and allow themselves ‘to rebel.’ In mixed [Arab-Jewish] cities, such as Ramle and Lod, there’s more of an inclination to openness, and then the potential for friction with the old norms increases. So it’s not surprising that there are many cases of murder in them. It’s important to remember that in those cities, too, the majority of the Arab population is of Bedouin origin, and the Bedouin norms still set the tone there.”

More broadly, Tali perceives that the term “honor” assumes variable forms. “The Arab family is becoming smaller, less clannish, and women are aspiring to more education and employment. These elements create dissonances and tensions with old worldviews.” He adds that although the public tends to assume that the “honor” issue is related to provocative sexual behavior, in actuality it is more deeply rooted in the question of how far the woman accepts the authority of her male relatives. “There are many women who have been murdered even though they did not do anything sexual. For example, a woman who doesn’t want to get engaged to a certain person, or who insists on getting a job, even though her husband objects.”

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1.6958257Thu, 21 Feb 2019 17:49:54Zvi Bar'elThu, 21 Feb 2019 14:26:17Andreas Schwer, by his own admission, has a dream job. A year and a half ago he was appointed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as CEO of Saudi Arabian Military Industries, the Saudi government umbrella organization responsible for all arms purchases and for developing a broad-based local arms industry for the kingdom.

In an interview with the Defense News website in August, Schwer said the company’s goal was to reach 50 percent local production of Saudi Arabia’s military needs by 2030, as opposed to only 2 percent today.

Meeting this goal would directly provide 40,000 jobs and about another 100,000 jobs indirectly – and would put Saudi Arabia among the world’s 25 largest arms producers. This goal, which comprises part of the reform plan announced by Prince Mohammed two years ago, Vision 2030, whose goal is to diversify the kingdom’s sources of revenues and reduce its dependence on oil – and also possibly reduce the country’s military dependence on Western arms manufacturers. This vision has a firm financial backing: $50 billion a year courtesy of the Saudi defense budget.

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But the generous funding is just part of the solution. Schwer says that Saudi Arabia’s military procurement strategy will have to transform from a vendor-client relationship to one of partnership with global suppliers. This will require foreign manufacturers to buy local Saudi products worth 50 percent of the contracts and to transfer manufacturing technology to the country, train local workers and build production lines in Saudi Arabia as a condition for the sales. This is where the real obstacles to the dream of nationalizing defense production lie, as it is for any other manufacturing that requires trained manpower and advanced technological knowledge.

Saudi Arabia suffers from a chronic shortage of technological manpower on which it would be able to build a sophisticated local industry in coming years. Despite the encouragement of technological education and sending delegations of students to Western countries, the gap between what exists today and what the country needs only keeps growing. Saudi universities are finding it difficult to recruit students for their technological departments because they require much harder work than in the social sciences and humanities. Most of the students prefer to study “easier” professions that will allow them to receive comfortable jobs in the government sector, or at least in private businesses.

Private foreign companies that operate in Saudi Arabia complain that Saudi workers find it hard to adopt the companies’ work culture, to meet exacting schedules, implement work plans with precision and even understand what they are asked to do. Sometimes these companies prefer to pay the Saudi employees’ wages and ask them to stay home, because their presence on the job interferes with the work of others. The requirement to hire Saudis is part of the broad legislation intended to nationalize work in the kingdom, but this legislation does not take into account the difficulties it creates for employers – in spite of the benefits they receive in return for hiring Saudis.

Saudi Arabia can only be jealous of the defense industries in countries such as Turkey and Iran, which have turned the sector into a powerful source of revenue. The revenue in turn allows the countries to rely more and more on local production, and as in the case of Iran even almost exclusively – and at the same time profit too. Iran had no choice but to develop its own technological capabilities, which has given it the ability to develop ballistic missiles, remotely-piloted aerial vehicles, warships and a wide range of ordnance – in addition to its nuclear program, which is based on knowledge it bought, but also on local management and development.

Turkey, which up until about a decade ago was dependent on foreign technology and procurement, is an example of a country that decided to change direction and produce a major part of its military needs on its own and even privatize some of its weapons manufacturers. Turkey exported $2 billion worth of arms last year and 2019 has begun with over $175 million in arms sales – a 64 percent increase when compared with sales in January 2018. Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said Turkey supplies itself with 70 percent of its military needs and intends on increasing this capability.

The difference between the Saudi vision and the Turkish capability is enormous. Turkey may not be able to compete with Saudi Arabia in the amount of money it produces, but the experienced, skilled and educated workers in Turkey give it an advantage that most Arab countries cannot supply. Turkey has markets in the West and Far East that are not open to Iran, and is also obtaining military experience on the ground and learning industrial lessons from it – in a similar manner to Israel’s military experience. Turkey is not the perfect image of a military power, but it has taken a major step forward in producing advanced weapons over the past decade, which attests to its long-term strategic thinking.

Turkey’s problem in the area of skilled manpower now actually lies in the area of the “brain drain.” The military industries are worried by the emigration of at least 200 engineers to Western countries in the past few months. But it is this flow of skilled manpower that reflects the abundance of skilled Turkish workers.

As opposed to Saudi students, in Turkey young people can obtain all their necessary training at local universities and institutes. Turkey also has the advantage of being able to import knowledge, partly because it is a member of NATO. And unlike Saudi Arabia, it does not need to hire foreign pilots to fly or maintain its combat planes. Saudi Arabia will need many more years to equal Turkey in the area of defense production, but at least it can afford to continue paying until then for what it needs.

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1.6957060Thu, 21 Feb 2019 17:36:15Naama RibaThu, 21 Feb 2019 17:36:17A street art festival called The Walls was held in Jerusalem in October. Among the works painted on the walls of abandoned and neglected buildings in the Talpiot neighborhood was a piece created by the American-Israeli street artist Addam Yekutieli (better known as Know Hope) close to the border with the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa.

The work, “246 Sides to a Story,” isn’t exactly a painting, more like a marking-out. It is very different from the project’s other pieces, which are joyous and colorful.

Yekutieli “took on” the former flour mill, which during the 1967 Six-Day War was burned out and caught in the crossfire. He labeled each bullet hole that remained from 1 to 246. He painted one vertical expanse of wall white and wrote a phrase or sentence corresponding to each number.

The phrases – as is common in Yekutieli’s work – don’t necessarily relate to each other and don’t necessarily have a meaning. All are in English. Examples include: The earth is not flat; Our scars aligned; Born into debt; What we said.

This piece, which can still be seen in Talpiot, marks a process the artist has been through in recent years: From anonymity and stealth art to uncovered work; from illegal works to commissions. Yekutieli was one of the first Israeli street artists to make this transition. Last week, another of his exhibitions, “A Pathology of Hope,” opened at Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Most Israeli street artists have not entered galleries or museums. When they do, they don’t necessarily change the way they operate. But Yekutieli revealed his identity.

“I did it because I work with people, and I asked them to share personal details with me, so it’s logical for my name to be known as well,” he explains. “When I was anonymous, 80 percent of the content of articles about me was about the anonymity and about the street pieces – and that’s not all that I do.”

The Gordon exhibition, which closes March 11, features a work called “246 Coins,” which is the clearest through line between the street and the gallery. In the piece, which is significantly smaller than the one on the old flour mill in Talpiot, Yekutieli drew 246 random black dots, resembling malignant beauty marks, on a white rectangle. They are placed on a thin line of dots that recall Israel’s Mediterranean coastline. It’s not coincidental. Yekutieli, 36, opted out of military service for reasons of conscience and his work has a political dimension.

You managed to create a political work on commission, and in Jerusalem at that. How did that happen?

“Commissions greatly change how things go down. The dynamic of carrying out the work is different, more planned. I didn’t run into problems with the commissioner. Planning in advance has its positive sides, too. A work like the one in Jerusalem can’t be done without a permit. It needs a production team, and I used a lift. I don’t think the commissioner influences the quality of the work or its messages.”

The Jerusalem piece was one of the few large works of street art Yekutieli has made in recent years, in part as a result of physical limitations he prefers not to go into. For three years, he didn’t paint one of the characters with which he is most identified – a gaunt, long-limbed figure whose heart was in a different place each time – until December, when he once more drew it at a site in south Tel Aviv.

“In the past few years I’ve been more interested in creating projects that have an intimacy to them. I do make political and social works, but I try to approach them from a more emotional and human place,” he explains.

Among Yekutieli’s recent works is “Parallels,” photographed in Lyon, France, and comprising two stages. In the first, he created a public intervention in the form of drawing a white border across a street, with contradictory statements such as “What We Believe” and “What We Know” written along either side. Then he showed images of each such intervention at the MAC Lyon museum, alongside an additional photograph that provides an interpretation of the statements.

For example, a picture of animals being led to slaughter alongside the above statements. Next to the statements “Our Side” and “Their Side” was a photograph of Israel’s West Bank separation barrier. In Nashville, Tennessee, on a series of billboards Yekutieli put up quotations from his correspondence with inmates on death row in a prison in the city, including “But I believe” and “We have realized.”

What other projects are you planning?

“I’m working on a project titled ‘A Human Atlas.’ I’m documenting scars on all types of people. I collect the photographs of the scars and plan to create a new map of the region in which we live. The result will be based on the topography of Palestine and Israel, and it ties in with an analogy between border and scar. The approach is political but the content is human. Israelis and West Bank Palestinians will be in the project; it’s more complicated with the Gaza Strip. The goal is to have between 150 and 200 participants.”

Amputated hands

In the Tel Aviv exhibition, Yekutieli uses images he used in his street art, such as delicate, intertwined hands that are exhibited, among other ways, as a sculpture of disembodied hands with red dots at the stump. Sawed-off tree branches shown in previous exhibitions were incorporated into an assemblage with drawings of hands.

Yael Shapira, a cultural researcher specializing in urban art, explains that Yekutieli turns the shorn tree limb into a symbol of the environment that has been cut down. “The same red rings on the tree stumps in the exhibition can be seen on the stumps of arms and hands, in an analogy to our relationship to our own environment.”

An additional motif repeated in Yekutieli’s work is birds. In two pieces, he piles into a glass box rather crude white plaster birds. The top part of the case is empty, with just one bird, alongside a brass plaque with sentences. The combination creates the sense of a museum exhibit. Next to the display cases is a glass case containing broken wings.

Drops are another recurring motif. In a high part of the gallery is a large work composed of wooden squares painted blue, on which are drawn, in shades of beige and brown, birds that from a distance resemble leaves. Drops, perhaps tears, fall from the birds. The drops also appear in “We Share These Things,” which features birds with drops falling from them.

“In Yekutieli’s work, drops are a sign of circumstance. Rain falls on everyone and everyone gets wet. It’s collective. A symbol of shared fate,” says Shapira, “Blue, which is very present in Yekutieli’s work and in this exhibition, is associated with sadness, as in its very name,” she adds.

Another interesting motif in his work is that of maps and fences. “This Region” consists of a paper map of Israel, folded and bound with string, while “Interdependent” is composed of pieces of fence that together form maps of Israel.

Yekutieli says his works in the gallery and in the street are different, but share similar iconography. “I made a separation between the more socially oriented projects and the iconographic projects, the ones exhibited in the gallery. In my mind it’s like two processes that deal with the same materials and are propelled by the same agenda, but that ultimately create different works in terms of display. In the exhibition, I tried to build a kind of archive or index of drawings and relics, and each element is numbered and every number has a sentence that’s a kind of fragment that corresponds with it and is open to interpretation. There’s an open narrative.”

What principles do you bring from the street to the gallery?

“From my perspective, both spaces enable different things and involve different creative processes. A gallery allows for quieter work. In the street, the work is part of a dynamic place. When I write text in the street, it’s obvious it’s another element that is part of the overall scene. I join a place in which I am not alone. In a gallery it’s only me – and that affects the work.”

Isn’t it odd to you to put the works into a frame?

“In a gallery there is absolute artistic freedom. For example, some of the exhibition consists of small drawings of hands. I didn’t care if they didn’t sell, if no solution was found for selling them.” (In the end, it was decided to sell the drawings as a group.) “The transition from wall to frame happened organically, not as part of a strategy. Art needs to be independent and free. It doesn’t necessarily have to be hung by an outside body. Nevertheless, there are logistics and production and expenses.”

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1.6953823Thu, 21 Feb 2019 17:33:20HaaretzThu, 21 Feb 2019 17:33:07Edward Kaprov, an Israeli photographer, with two decades experience, has in recent years been taking pictures using the mid-19th century collodion wet plate process. The technique entails coating a glass plate in liquid substances, fixing it in the camera, exposing it to the subject of the shot for a few seconds and then developing it - all within 10-15 minutes, before the glass dries.]]>https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/iran-to-hold-annual-war-games-in-strategic-strait-of-hormuz-1.6957854
1.6957854Thu, 21 Feb 2019 17:29:58The Associated PressThu, 21 Feb 2019 15:49:15Iran’s navy says it will hold an annual drill in the strategic Strait of Hormuz as pressure mounts on the country months after the United States re-imposed sanctions on Iran, targeting its vital oil sector.

The strait is located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and is crucial to global energy supplies, with about a third of all oil traded at sea passing through it.

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Iranian Adm. Hossein Khanzadi told state TV on Thursday the 3-day maneuvers will start on Friday and extend as far as the Sea of Oman and the fringes of the Indian Ocean.

He said submarines, warships, helicopters and surveillance planes will participate in the drill, dubbed as “Velayat-97.” The exercise will include missile launches from the vessels.

Iran regularly holds maneuvers in the strait and in the past has issued warnings that it would shut down the Strait of Hormuz if it's blocked from exporting its crude because of U.S. pressure and renewed sanctions on Iran.

Tehran feels increasingly under pressure after President Donald Trump pulled America out of the landmark nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in May.

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1.6958175Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:31:04The Associated PressThu, 21 Feb 2019 15:30:37“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett has turned himself in to police, after being charged Wednesday with making a false police report. The accusation concerned his statement that he was attacked in downtown Chicago by two men who hurled racist and anti-gay slurs and looped a rope around his neck, police said.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said prosecutors charged Smollett with felony disorderly conduct, an offense that could bring one to three years in prison and force the actor to pay for the cost of the investigation into his report of a Jan. 29 beating.

Authorities were trying to get in touch with Smollett’s attorneys to “negotiate a reasonable surrender,” Guglielmi said. That could involve the actor, who is black and gay, turning himself in to a Chicago police station.

Police did not have a time frame for how long the actor would be given.

“We are trying to be diplomatic and reasonable, and we’re hoping he does the same,” Guglielmi said.

The charges emerged on the same day that detectives and two brothers who were earlier deemed suspects testified before a grand jury. Smollett’s attorneys met with prosecutors and police, but it was unknown what they discussed or whether Smollett attended the meeting.

In a statement, attorneys Todd Pugh and Victor Henderson said Smollett “enjoys the presumption of innocence, particularly when there has been an investigation like this one where information, both true and false, has been repeatedly leaked.”

The announcement of the charges followed a flurry of activity in recent days, including lengthy interviews of the brothers by authorities, a search of their home and their release after police cleared them.

Investigators have not said what the brothers told detectives or what evidence detectives collected. But it became increasingly clear that serious questions had arisen about Smollett’s account — something police signaled Friday when they announced a “significant shift in the trajectory” of the probe after the brothers were freed.

Smollett, who plays a gay character on the hit Fox television show, said he was attacked as he was walking home from a Subway sandwich shop. He said the masked men beat him, made derogatory comments and yelled “This is MAGA country” — an apparent reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again” — before fleeing.

Earlier Wednesday, Fox Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television issued a statement saying Smollett “continues to be a consummate professional on set” and that his character is not being written off the show. The series is shot in Chicago and follows a black family as they navigate the ups and downs of the recording industry.

The studio’s statement followed reports that Smollett’s role was being slashed amid the police investigation.

Whispers about Smollett’s potential role in the attack started with reports that he had not fully cooperated with police and word that detectives in a city bristling with surveillance cameras could not find video of the attack.

Detectives did find and release images of two people they said they wanted to question and last week picked up the brothers at O’Hare Airport as they returned from Nigeria. Police questioned the men and searched their apartment.

The brothers, who were identified by their attorney as Abimbola “Abel” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, were held for nearly 48 hours on suspicion of assaulting Smollett.

The day after they were released, police said the men provided information that had ”shifted the trajectory of the investigation,” and detectives requested another interview with Smollett.

Police said one of the men had appeared on “Empire,” and Smollett’s attorneys said one of the men is the actor’s personal trainer, whom he hired to help get him physically ready for a music video. The actor released his debut album, “Sum of My Music,” last year.

Smollett was charged by prosecutors, not the grand jury. The police spokesman said the brothers appeared before the panel to “lock in their testimony.”

Speaking outside the courthouse where the grand jury met, the brothers’ attorney said the two men testified for about two and a half hours.

“There was a point where this story needed to be told, and they manned up and they said we’re going to correct this,” Gloria Schmidt said.

She said her clients did not care about a plea deal or immunity. “You don’t need immunity when you have the truth,” she said.

She also said her clients received money from Smollett, but she did not elaborate.

Smollett has been active in LBGTQ issues, and initial reports of the assault drew outrage and support for him on social media, including from Sen. Kamala Harris of California and TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

Referring to a published account of the attack, President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that “it doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned.”

But several hours after Smollett was declared a suspect and the charges announced, there was little reaction from celebrities online.

Former Cook County prosecutor Andrew Weisberg said judges rarely throw defendants in prison for making false reports, opting instead to place them on probation, particularly if they have no prior criminal record.

Smollett has a record — one that concerns giving false information to police when he was pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence. According to records, he was also charged with false impersonation and driving without a license. He later pleaded no contest to a reduced charge and took an alcohol education and treatment program.

Another prospective problem is the bill someone might receive after falsely reporting a crime that prompted a nearly monthlong investigation, including the collection and review of hundreds of hours of surveillance video.

The size of the tab is anyone’s guess, but given how much time the police have invested, the cost could be huge.

Weisberg recently represented a client who was charged with making a false report after surveillance video discredited her account of being robbed by three men at O’Hare Airport.

For an investigation that took only a single day, his client had to split restitution of $8,400, Weisberg said. In Smollett’s case, “I can imagine that this would be easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Earlier this week, Chicago’s top prosecutor, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, announced that she had recused herself from the investigation.

Her office explained Wednesday that Foxx made the decision “out of an abundance of caution” because of conversations she had with one of Smollett’s family members just after the report. When the relative expressed concerns about the case, Foxx “facilitated a connection” between the family member and detectives, according to a statement.

Foxx said the case would be handled to her first assistant, Joseph Magats, a 28-year veteran prosecutor.

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1.6957805Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:05:54Gadi TaubThu, 21 Feb 2019 15:05:35ZURICH – What does it mean to be a star in the intellectual world? If an academic is a star in his lifetime, it usually means that he’s invited to lots of conferences, cited in professional journals or even in the public media. Sometimes, more rarely, he also writes books that reach an audience beyond a small circle of experts. Say, someone like Yuval Noah Harari or Francis Fukayama. But Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor from the University of Toronto, has gained fame on a much larger scale. We’re talking rock star, a bona-fide celebrity.

His 2018 book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” has sold two million copies in 45 languages. The accompanying lecture tour has been selling out worldwide. But YouTube is Peterson’s main platform and his videos rack up tens of millions of views.

We caught up with him in Zurich a few weeks ago where his daughter Mikhaila (named for Gorbachev) had surgery. Mikhaila is also his business manager, which is quite a job. This is an international operation that involves event production, marketing and PR. Haaretz was given a limited window between media interviews and a lecture Peterson was due to give that evening.

The 1,200-seat Volkshaus concert hall is sold out. At 7:45 P.M., 1,200 Swiss men and women wait in an orderly line that winds down the block. Across the street, there is a protest against Peterson, so the Zurich police are deployed there.

The doors open and the hall quickly fills. Security personnel with walkie-talkies roam the aisles, alert for possible disrupters willing to pay $75 a ticket for the chance to interrupt Peterson’s talk. Finally, an unseen announcer intones, “Ladies and gentlemen … Jordan B. Pe-ter-son!!!” and a hearty round of applause erupts. Then Peterson, tall and slim, wearing a three-piece suit, takes the stage, wearing one of those Madonna-style cheek mics.

Then comes a 90-minute lecture about why, in so many folk tales, femininity symbolizes chaos while masculinity symbolizes order, one of Peterson's main themes. Like many other lectures by him, this one too features his idiosyncratic mixture of evolutionary biology, empirical social sciences research, his experiences as a practicing clinical psychologist and Jungian cultural analysis.

The components are integrated conversationally, with passion, for Peterson comes across as a sensitive and emotional man (at the end of the interview, we had to stop for a moment when he got choked up while speaking about his children).

But ultimately, if you consider his profound respect for religious faith, his dislike of revolutions and social engineering, his faith in meritocracy, and what Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life” – Peterson can be seen as following in the tradition of Edmund Burke: conservatism that is anti-revolutionary but not anti-liberal. And yet, labeling him a conservative, as so many of his detractors do, is also imprecise. In his view we can't make do with order, for a measure of chaos is essential to innovation, creativity, adaptability.

Peterson has a simple explanation for his extraordinary popularity: In a culture that sanctifies victimhood, he proposes that people confront life’s inevitable pain unflinchingly. So here is Peterson in a nutshell: Life is suffering. We can only bear it if life has meaning. And meaning is created when you take responsibility – by confronting hardship and firmly steering your ship forward, even against waves that will, ultimately, overwhelm it. This is a message people are “hungry for” in our times, he says.

Peterson has focused on the subject of meaning for many years. His previous book was entitled “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.” We’ll come to this. But first, I suggested to him another reason for his celebrity: We're all living under a tyranny of political correctness and not only did you defy it, you also never cede the higher moral ground to its champions. You’re not apologetic in front of the identity crowd.

“No, I’m not I’m not a fan of the identity crowd people… Learning an ideology that a halfwit could master in two weeks doesn’t make you moral.”

But that’s the spirit of the times. For example, students increasingly begin questions with "as a": "As a member of this group, I am offended that you say this or that."

“I’d say I don’t answer questions formulated in that manner. Let’s say your goal is to tell the truth and someone asks you a question that has a trap in it. I’m not playing that game. That doesn’t mean I would necessarily be smart enough all the time to notice that was happening and to formulate that response; it's happened to me with journalists all the time.”

The American Psychological Association recently published new guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men that says “traditional masculinity" is "harmful.” You were not very happy with this.

“I’m absolutely ashamed to call myself a psychologist in the aftermath. They said it was guidelines for the psychological treatment of boys and men, but that isn’t what it is; it’s a social justice treatise on how you better think if you’re a psychologist if you don’t want to be pursued.”

But is there really nothing to be said for this approach? How about curbing aggressive instincts?

“Definitely not! You just can’t damn instincts. It’s not helpful. You’re going to get rid of aggression? You don’t like ambition? You don’t like purpose? You don’t like persistence? … I think [the authors of the APA article] justify reprehensible weakness by an all-out assault on the idea of strength and competence, and that they clothed that in virtue… It’s a nauseating document.”

Peterson returns to this topic during his talk at the Volkshaus. An excess of masculinity isn’t the problem – that is an “anti-truth,” he says. Because one of the most reliable predictors of criminal behavior is fatherlessness. That is by far “the biggest risk factor for long-term delinquency antisocial behavior and violent criminality.”

No, I won’t shut up!

Jordan Peterson was born in 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up in Fairview, in the far north of Canada. The winters of his youth were long, dark and difficult, with Siberian temperatures lasting for days on end. Perhaps that's one key to his tragic outlook on life.

His father Walter, a taciturn teacher, used to go hunting in the Northern Plains and sometimes took his son along. Jordan’s father taught him to read when he was just 3, which he remembers as a pleasant experience. His mother Beverley was a nurse but worked as a librarian. A woman with a good sense of humor, her son liked to make her laugh. Peterson has described her as agreeable, to the point where she often finds it hard to stand her ground.

As he describes his own practice as a therapist, he is out to help his patients learn to do just that: stand their ground.

At college, Peterson became enchanted with literature and philosophy, and was drawn to the works of thinkers with a profound sense of the tragic: Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Carl Jung. The first subject he researched was modern totalitarianism, in an effort to understand how human beings could perpetrate such monumental horrors upon one another. The huge "piles of corpses” in the 20th century immunized him against utopian temptations. Then he turned to other subjects. He wrote his doctoral thesis in psychology on alcoholism, but became increasingly interested in culture and mythology, in the tradition inaugurated by Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.

For years, Peterson has been filming his courses and posting the videos on YouTube. One can thus join his University of Toronto students in pondering the deep and common patterns of meaning which, he believes, underlay all civilizations.

But he really gained renown following Canada’s passage of Bill C-16 in 2017, which added “gender identity or expression” as a prohibited basis for discrimination, and advanced the demand that transgender people be addressed by their preferred pronoun. Peterson posted an hour-long YouTube video explaining why he wouldn’t agree to be told how to speak. In no time, of course, he was accused of being a transphobe, a misogynist, a racist, and later also an “mean white man.”

It helped little that he said – repeatedly – that he addresses transgender students in his class in their preferred pronoun. He just would not accept the law that dictated how to speak. A huge uproar ensued. But Peterson's tone – at once assertive, unapologetic and patiently polite – effectively withstood the shrill self-righteousness of the guardians of the faith. To everyone's surprise, he never lost his balance.

That took a lot of fortitude. In the dozens of interviews with him on YouTube, many of them hostile, the most recurring theme is probably this: “That’s not what I said.” Since political correctness is largely a game of exposing real and imagined prejudices – Aha! Gotcha! – putting words in someone’s mouth it is the name of the game. And so Peterson was accused of thinking, feeling and saying much that he never thought, felt or said.

What was surprising about all this, was that the progressive tsunami failed to drown him. Instead, he surfed into the limelight. The tsunami actually made him a mega-celebrity.

How is it that something meant to silence him ended up doing the opposite? I think this was, roughly, what was at work: Anyone who has listened to Peterson honestly knew he harbored no hatred of transgender people, gays, women or minorities. This was most obviously a false, and malicious, accusation. Peterson the therapist is against the cult of victimhood – not against victims. Because, in his view, making victimhood the center of identity is bound to backfire. It traps you, and prevents you from overcoming whatever your predicament may be.

This being the case, the attempt to frame his critique of victimhood as a kind of defense of his "white male privilege" smacked of dishonesty. And so the more he was absurdly accused of racism or misogyny, the more it seemed to many that he was right. It became plain that social justice warriors were actually advising us all not to improve our lot, so as not to lose our precious victimhood.

This was no longer just an argument: It morphed into political theater, a scene that repeats itself in numerous interviews as, resolutely and unapologetically, Peterson rebuffs attempts to attribute to him a position that is not his, malice that he does not harbor, mistakes he did not make. Again and again, he patently corrected his interlocutors: “That’s not what I said.”

These endlessly repetitive verbal battles also illustrated the growing gap between the literal meaning of words like “racist,” “transphobe” and “misogynist,” and their function in popular discourse. They’ve become a means of silencing, rather than labels for actual opinions. As Israeli political scientist Dan Schueftan has quipped: The new meaning of the word “racist” is "I have no answer to your argument, but I demand that you shut up."

And as the progressive attacks increasingly seemed less like arguments and more like attempts to silence Peterson, more and more people came to feel that his opposition to C-16 and his insistence on freedom of speech were not just necessary but actually urgent. After a while the subtext subsumed the text and it all boiled down to this: "Shut up!" and then, "No, I won’t shut up."

Political correctness is a direct and steep slope from politeness to dishonesty and lies. And Peterson esposed the fact that we have begun to swear at truths we don't like, rather than facing them.

And so between one “That’s not what I said” and another (“I didn’t say women are chaotic, I said that in many mythologies femininity symbolizes chaos”), Peterson has exposed the shame and self-censorship, the depth of conformism, and the lack of honestly and courage in our academia, our press, our political discourse. Which explains the tremendous hostility that he elicits.

Capitalism vs. serotonin

The social media era has spawned the horror of online witch hunts, where anonymous accusations fly and virtual public executions proceed at lightning speed without anything like due process. But it has also opened up new options for defending oneself. When you have an audience like Peterson’s and the ability to reach it over the heads and under the noses of established media, when you’re borne aloft on huge waves of popularity – you can’t be easily silenced. Even a petition signed by 200 faculty members in 2017, calling for his dismissal from the University of Toronto, couldn’t budge him from his job.

Not that he doesn't invite trouble, as with his recurrent attacks on the very heart of the contemporary hegemony. For example, the feminist axiom that we, in liberal democracies, live under an oppressive patriarchy. I didn’t ask him about this since it was a shame to waste our time on this conversation, which, I think, I can fake reasonably well by now, having heard him go through it so many times. It usually goes something like this:

Peterson: Western society is not an oppressive patriarchal structure.

Journalist: But don’t you agree that men hold most of the political power and most of the property?

Peterson: A small group of men hold it. Most men have little power, if at all. In fact, they are more disproportionately represented at the bottom of the social ladder. Nearly all deaths on the battlefield are of men. The vast majority of fatal workplace accidents – men. The vast majority of suicides, of homeless people, of prisoners – men. You want equal representation? How about equal representation in jail, or among coal miners or repairmen working with high-voltage wires?

Then the journalist would ask: What about the gender pay gap?

And Peterson would respond: There is no gender pay gap. That’s a statistical fiction.

Journalist: Are you denying the fact that women earn less than men?

Peterson: There is a discrepancy between because women work fewer hours on average, in professions that pay less, in less senior positions, and because they devote more time to their family. Very few men, and even fewer women, are prepared to sacrifice everything for the single-minded pursuit of a career.

Journalists: Because our education system creates gender bias.

Peterson: No. As freedom of choice increases, women turn more, not less, to "female" professions, as studies in Scandinavian countries have repeatedly shown.

Journalist: So you’re saying that women are less talented.

Peterson: That’s not what I said.

And so on.

The anger Peterson arouses derives in part, undoubtedly, from his rejection of the idea that gender roles are wholly the result of social construction. The insistence that they are to a large extent biologically determined strikes at the heart of progressive optimism. That optimism presumes that anything can be changed with the aid of enlightened social engineering, that nothing about us is immutable.

Peterson is, of course, not the first to note that such utopian visions have spawned some of history’s greatest atrocities. Anyone who thinks that Marx's egalitarian utopia can be realized without Stalin's or Mao's violence, he thinks, is either unbelievably arrogant and foolish. Though any decent person, Peterson thinks, should strive for equality of opportunity, equality of outcome can only be achieved with brutality. Hierarchies are natural, and are not just older than capitalism, they are far older than humanity.

If you want to understand their origin, you must go back some 350 million years at least, before the dinosaurs, to serotonin-based nervous systems, like that of lobsters, which react to relative social standing: Climbing up the social ladder, via competition, causes a release of serotonin and boosts the lobster’s vitality, like it does to us. And like us, lobsters respond to treatment with medications like Prozac. Hierarchies emerge from our most basic and natural strivings. We cannot eliminate them, nor should we try. We should only aspire to keep them based on competence, not domination.

You mentioned that chimpanzees can tear each other apart. Their violence is natural. Are human impulses also inherently bad?

“Human beings are inherently good and evil and society is inherently good and evil and nature is inherently benevolent and rapacious, and that’s paradoxical and it’s terrible, but you’re stuck with it.”

How would you describe the kind of therapy you do?

“Mostly behavioral. I’m a very practical person so I always look for the simplest possible approach to a problem.”

Suppose I came to your office for the first time. What would that first session look like?

“The first thing I’m going to do is assume the position of rather radical ignorance, which is what behavioral psychologists do… I’m going to listen to you for a long time before I dare to specify what the problem might be, and we’ll decide that together dialectically.”

Stand up straight

At first glance, Peterson’s book “12 Rules for Life” – which just came out in Hebrew translation (Shibolet Press) – looks like a natural follow-up to behavioral therapy. Ostensibly, it’s a self-help book full of practical advice, some of it quite banal. The rules range from “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (Rule 1), to the more surprising “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” (Rule 5).

Reviews, predictably, run the full gamut: from fans who view Peterson as a guru, to detractors who see him as evil, a charlatan, a reactionary or the opposite – just another optimistic and sentimental North American psychologist telling you to listen to others, the think positive and set small achievable goals. “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today,” Rule 4 suggests. And “Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street,” says Rule 12 (which obviously wasn’t born of experience with Israeli felines).

But the rules really act as pegs on which to hang discussions that, as usual with Peterson, combine various disciplines and genres. So we get neurology and hermeneutics blended with free association, literature, evolution, politics and philosophy. They are highly accessible and mostly popular without being dilettantish.

Every chapter is like a sermon, a conversation. The depth is not uniform, but the prose flows and exudes the author's clear, friendly voice. But above all, here too, Peterson is preoccupied by the question of meaning and how it makes us see life as worth living, despite suffering. This is, for him, the ultimate question. And on this subject he has a wealth of fascinating thoughts and surprising associations, alongside logical (or faith-based) leaps. It is still a work in progress, with many tributaries still in need of being worked out.

Your argument that we need meaning to cope with suffering – is it a philosophical argument or…

“No, it’s a theological argument.”

I’ll rephrase then: Is it a theological or a psychological argument? Do we need meaning or do we need a sense of meaning?

“We need real meaning; meaning is real.”

The illusion will not help.

"No, the illusion will hurt. Illusions don't help."

But can’t the sense of meaning stem, for example, from belonging to a group?

“Yes, definitely. What I'd say is: The sense of meaning or the purpose is implicit [in the group's activity]. You don’t know what it is, but it’s in there. It’s like, you’re a member of a wolf pack and the pack is doing something; you don’t know what it is, you’re just a wolf. But if you’re a person and you’re associated with a bunch of other people, you find meaning [but] it doesn’t mean you can articulate it.”

It’s not certain that that’s enough for making the leap from the subjective feeling to the objective answer. But for Peterson, in a profound sense, there’s an answer, and it can be called “God.” In any case, it is inseparable from faith, which in his opinion is essential, for both meaning and in order.

In “12 Rules for Life,” he writes that faith is the understanding “that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.” I was sorry after meeting him that I did not cite this in answer to his argument about the harmfulness of illusions of meaning.

So do you – like Rousseau, or Kant, or even William James – in effect offer a pragmatic argument for God’s existence? Do we have to believe in God because it’s beneficial?

“That question always stops me,” he says, after a silence. “You need to aim at some transcendent ethic, you have to do that, and the reason is that the transcendent ethic is the way that things are put right. It’s not an illusion, it’s not a mere rational construct, it’s not an invention, it’s none of those things. It’s something that you discover, and you discover it despite yourself.”

Because the concepts Peterson uses are taken from a host of disciplines, they are not easy to place. But they are what his intellectual project has been based on. Its aim: to come up with a shared pattern of meaning, which the biological, the psychological and the cultural-theological all reflect in different ways.

The mythopoetic truth in folk tales is found in archetypes in the unconscious, which are in turn based on our biological makeup. In other words, within our nervous system, subconsciously and beyond our control, meaning is embedded, grafted onto our hardware. And that meaning assumes narrative patterns in the psyche, expressed through archetypes that reflect our system of urges. They in turn find an echo, a reflection in the formative narratives of every culture, throughout generations. Peterson's quest for the underlying maps of meaning is by no means a modest one.

Peterson: “One thing Nietzsche proposed when he talked about the death of God and the potential for catastrophe that would emerge as a consequence was that people would have to create their own values. We would have to replace the external valuation scheme that religion provided with something that was psychological, let’s say. And Jung knew where Nietzsche was wrong because of what he learned from Freud.

“What Jung learned from Freud was that we weren’t masters in our own house. That we’re beholden to psychological phenomena that are beyond our voluntary control. We have a nature and that expresses itself within us, in ways that we cannot control rationally. It’s phenomenological reality, but it’s reality nonetheless, like the reality of a dream. You don’t invent your dreams. Like an involuntary sense, they manifest themselves in the field of your imagination.”

But Freud was secular. Freud thought God is a childish invention of those who refuse to grow up and give up their father.

“Yes, he thought religion was a grand wish fulfillment. But it’s a very shallow criticism and that’s why Jung and Freud broke and Freud produced what’s essentially a religious system as a replacement [in the guise of his psychoanalytic theory].”

According to Jung, says Peterson, you don’t just discover your own values: “They manifest themselves to you. Jung felt that the religious instinct is operating within the psyche. You can understand this if you start to watch yourself. You’ll see that you’re guided by forces that operate within you that you do not control. You can bargain and negotiate with them like Abraham negotiated with God in the Old Testament [about the fate of Sodom]. You’re not passive, you’re not the passive puppet of your own intrinsic desires. But you’re not the master of them by any stretch of the imagination, so you have to cooperate with them.”

So between the archetypes and culture, on one hand, and natural impulses on the other, is there room for free will and agency?

“It’s bargaining. It’s a struggle. You’re contending with Titans.”

I want to end on a personal note. Is there a moment that you particularly remember that represents your fatherhood, your way of being a father?

“All the time.”

That was when we paused. His eyes welled up and his voice cracked.

“A sensitive subject this week, because I was in the hospital … with my daughter, and we were not sure how the surgery would go and… it’s kind of an overwhelming experience.” (The surgery was an ankle replacement, which was being done for the second time.) "My daughter was unbelievably ill for like decades. It’s been brutal.”

Mikhaila Peterson has an autoimmune disease with very serious symptoms and psychological effects whose origin is also partly physiological. The disease, which attacks the joints, is accompanied by paralyzing depressions. During certain periods could stay awake only with the help of Ritalin, for a few hours.

Her parents went crazy, her father recalls. “We used to give her hell: ‘Why the hell can’t you get up?’ ‘You’re sleeping your life away.’ It’s like while she was sleeping 8-10 hours a day, we didn’t know exactly where the weakness of character ended and the physiological degeneration began; neither did she. You fight to find that line. One of the terrible things about having a chronic illness is that you also get hell for it all the time because people mistake it for weakness of character.”

In a podcast interview with Joe Rogan, Peterson said that the family were convinced Mikhaila was dying. But she didn’t give up. She began to experiment with nutrition, and reached a curious conclusion that's been mentioned in interviews with Peterson ever since: After a roller coaster of skin rashes, depression, paralyzing infections and other symptoms, she found a solution on her own: a diet of only red meat and water. Nothing else. Not even salt.

The symptoms disappeared. Peterson, the scientist, is awestruck because there is no explanation as to why this works as it does. But Mikhaila convinced even him to try the diet. He’s been on it for some months, but is less strict than she: He salts his meat and drinks sparkling water, too. It has had a great effect, he reports. His proclivity to depression, the unreasonable difficulties he had getting up in the morning, the extra weight – they've mostly disappeared. Still, he stresses that he doesn’t recommend the diet to anyone.

But the struggle to restore Mikhaila’s health also opens a window on Peterson’s battle against victimhood as a basis for identity. The entire issue seems much more personal when you think about a parent fighting for his daughter’s life, who's realized that in order to continue the battle, she must not sink into an abyss of self-pity, at the bottom of which there can only be despair, perhaps even death.

So here is your first rule for life: Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

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1.6958031Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:26:43HaaretzThu, 21 Feb 2019 18:52:40Meir Kahane, the founder and leader of Israel’s openly racist Kach party in the 1970s and ’80s, was assassinated in the United States after delivering a lecture at a Manhattan hotel on November 5, 1990.

Yet his name is currently dominating Israeli politics after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed Otzma Yehudit – an extremist party led by followers of the racist rabbi – to run on a joint ticket with another far-right party, Habayit Hayehudi.

Netanyahu has reportedly offered the extremists several portfolios in the next government if he gets the chance to form a right-wing governing coalition – a possibility strengthened by having the Otzma-Habayit alliance likely to pass the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent and win seats in the April 9 election.

There has been much talk about “Kahanists” returning to the Knesset, but what does this mean? And who exactly is the extremist rabbi who has returned to Israeli politics with a vengeance?

Who was Rabbi Meir Kahane?

Born Martin David Kahane in Brooklyn in 1932, Kahane was raised in an Orthodox, Revisionist Zionist home in Flatbush. He was the son of a European-born rabbi and was active in the right-wing youth movement Betar. He received rabbinical ordination at New York's Mir Yeshiva and later earned a BA and law degrees at several different New York institutions.

In the ’50s, he served briefly as a congregational rabbi and also reportedly worked as a freelance agent for the FBI, being assigned the task of infiltrating the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society.

In 1968, he established the Jewish Defense League. Although its initial function was to provide physical protection to Jews in urban neighborhoods via “anti-mugger patrols” (echoing the Holocaust, its slogan was “Never Again”), it quickly became part of a violent U.S. political campaign against what it saw as more high-profile enemies of the Jewish people.

Most significant was the role it played in pressing the Soviet Union to stop persecuting its Jews and allow them freedom of emigration. Whereas other groups in the Free Soviet Jewry campaign during the ’70s and ’80s staged sometimes audacious acts to draw attention to the cause, the JDL attacked Russian targets: an Aeroflot airline office; a Soviet diplomat’s residence; and performances given by visiting Russian cultural ensembles in the United States.

The JDL was also implicated in attacks on Arab diplomatic missions and the killing of Alex Odeh, head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, in 1985. However, no one was ever convicted for the murder and the crime took place long after Kahane had left the United States.

He had immigrated to Israel in 1971, immediately establishing his ultranationalist, Orthodox Kach political party. In 1973, 1977 and 1981, the party failed to gain enough votes to pass the electoral threshold and enter the Knesset. During those years, Kahane became involved in a campaign to convince the Jewish public of the need to expel its Arab citizens as well as the Palestinians from the occupied territories.

He wrote a book called “They Must Go” and was arrested over 60 times for provocative actions against Arabs. He openly declared that Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic, and that his choice was a state guided by Jewish law: “I want a Jewish state, not a Hebrew-speaking Portugal,” he was once quoted as saying.

Kahane finally entered the Knesset in 1984 when his Kach party won a single seat in that year’s election. He was largely ostracized by fellow MKs, with his Knesset speeches usually being attended only by officials who were required to be there, such as the transcriptionist.

However, his militant anti-Arab positions and strong nationalist-religious message brought him increasing public support. This led to speculation that Kach could receive multiple seats in the next election. In 1985, the Israeli parliament amended its election laws, barring racists and inciters from running. Kahane appealed the decision to the Supreme Court but lost, and was disqualified from standing in the 1988 election.

After their ouster from mainstream politics, a group of Kach activists formed an extremist terror group known as the Sicarii, which conducted a series of terror attacks on Palestinians and left-wing Jewish Israelis. Their activities were only curtailed after Israeli police started investigating their actions in March 1989.

Kahane continued to espouse his racist views about Israel belonging solely to the Jews. For example, he repeatedly called for an “exchange of populations,” suggesting a $40,000 payment to those Arabs voluntarily leaving Israel and forcible expulsion for anyone refusing to leave.

On the evening of November 5, 1990, Kahane was delivering a talk to a Jewish group at the New York Marriott East Side, on Lexington Avenue. Afterward, as he was greeting well-wishers, he was approached by a man dressed as an Orthodox Jew, who shot him at short range with a .357-caliber pistol. Kahane died shortly after. But his story does not end there.

Who are the Kahanists?

After Kahane’s death, Kach split into two factions: Kach and Kahane Chai (“Kahane Lives”), which was led by his son, Benyamin Ze’ev Kahane. (The latter and his wife were both killed, and five of their six children wounded, when their van was fired upon in the West Bank during the second intifada, in December 2000). Both factions were banned from standing in the 1992 Knesset election.

The Israeli government declared both Kach and Kahane Chai illegal terror organizations in 1994, following the February 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs by a Kach supporter, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, which killed 29 Muslim worshippers. That same year, Kach was also placed on the U.S. State Department and European Union lists of outlawed terror groups.

After the groups disbanded, the heads of Kahane Chai formed an advocacy group known as The Kahane Movement, maintaining Kahane's ideology and speeches on the website kahane.org. However, this was also seen as an extension of Kach and was listed as a terror organization by the United States.

Several Kach supporters have remained active in Israeli politics over the subsequent years, including Michael Ben-Ari, who served in the Knesset as a National Union lawmaker between 2009 and 2013. He is one of several Kach followers now standing for Otzma Yehudit, which has just agreed a unity pact with fellow far-right, pro-settler party Habayit Hayehudi. Ben-Ari, Benzi Gopstein, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir were also involved in the segregationist Lehava movement – the racist group that opposes personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews.

According to the election pact, Otzma Yehudit (which means “Jewish Strength”) will receive the fifth and eighth slots on the party ticket with Habayit Hayehudi. This gives Kahanists a real chance of returning to the Knesset some 31 years after their leader was barred from it.

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1.6957522Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:20:34ReutersThu, 21 Feb 2019 14:19:49Islamic State looks about to lose its last foothold on the banks of the Euphrates in Syria, but though its era of territorial rule may have been expunged for now, there is near universal agreement that the group remains a threat.

What has its territorial defeat accomplished?

Islamic State’s possession of land in Iraq and Syria set it apart from other like-minded groups such as Al-Qaida and became central to its mission when it declared a caliphate in 2014, claiming sovereignty over all Muslim lands and peoples.

>> Read more: The rise and fall of ISIS: From organization to state | Analysis

Destroying the quasi-state it built there denies the group its most potent propaganda and recruiting tool as well as a logistical base from which it could train fighters and plan coordinated attacks overseas.

It also freed its former subjects from summary executions and draconian punishment for breaking its strict laws or, for some minorities, sexual slavery and slaughter.

Warfare wiped out thousands of its fighters. And, financially, its defeat deprives it of greater resources than any modern jihadist movement has enjoyed, including taxes on its inhabitants and the proceeds of oil sales.

What threat does Islamic State still pose in Iraq and Syria?

In its previous guise as an Al-Qaida offshoot in Iraq a decade ago, it navigated adversity by going underground, biding its time to rise suddenly again.

Since suffering devastating territorial losses in 2017, IS has steadily turned again to such tactics. Sleeper cells in Iraq have staged a scatter-gun campaign of kidnappings and killings to undermine the Baghdad government.

The group has also carried out many bombings in northeast Syria, which is controlled by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, including one that killed four Americans in January. Kurdish and U.S. officials say its threat there persists.

In Syria, its fighters still hold out in the remote desert area near the road from Damascus to Deir al-Zor.

What has happened to its leaders, fighters and followers?

The fate of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remains a mystery. The U.S. government’s top experts strongly believe he is alive and possibly hiding in Iraq, U.S. sources recently said. Other top-echelon leaders have been killed in air strikes.

Thousands of its fighters and civilian followers have also been killed and thousands more captured. An unknown number remain at large in both Syria and Iraq.

Iraq is putting on trial, imprisoning and often executing Islamic State detainees. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holds around 800 foreign fighters. More than 2,000 Islamic State wives and children are in its hands too. Many low-level local operatives have been released in Syria.

The SDF complains that Western states are reluctant to take back the foreign fighters, who are widely seen as a security threat at home but who might be hard to legally prosecute.

Can it still organize or inspire attacks overseas?

As Islamic State clung to its last scrap of land, the head of Britain’s spy agency MI6 warned that the group would return to “asymmetric” attacks.

North Korea diplomats sidelined ahead of talks

Even after it began losing ground militarily, the group still claimed responsibility for attacks made in different countries, though often these have been blamed on “lone wolves” without its direction.

It started years ago to call on followers abroad to plan their own attacks, rather than focusing purely on ones staged by trained operatives supported by the group’s hierarchy.

In early 2018 the head of U.S. military central command said Islamic State was resilient and remained capable of “inspiring attacks throughout the region and outside of the Middle East”.

What does its fall mean for the future of global jihad?

Although Islamic State’s core territory was in Iraq and Syria, jihadists fighting in other countries, notably Nigeria, Yemen and Afghanistan, pledged their allegiance to it.

Whether those groups will still wear its mantle, especially if Baghdadi is captured or killed, is an open question, but there seems little chance they will soon end their campaigns.

Al-Qaeda also retains numerous franchises around the world and other militant Islamist groups operate in countries where normal governance has broken down.

Jihadist ideology has long proven itself able to mutate as circumstances change, and there is no shortage of warfare, injustice, oppression, poverty, sectarianism and naked religious hatred for it to exploit.

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1.6957970Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:54:36Etan Nechin Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:54:26Benjamin Netanyahu faced media criticism this week for hosting the right-wing prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary who have been accused of being anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic. But in response, Likud MK Anat Berko epitomized Netanyahu’s politics in a single sentence: "They might be anti-Semites, but they’re on our side."

Netanyahu lost his moral compass years ago, but in this election cycle - a chronicle of a victory foretold - he no longer cares about appearing as the fascist-enabling Pied Piper who will lead Israel into oblivion and isolation only to keep himself in power.

Netanyahu has been working hard in the last few weeks to help create a coalition between Jewish Home, the latest incarnation of the Mafdal, a venerable religious Zionist party, and a party called Otzma Yehudit, which could be called the Jewish National Front, a radical far right party whose members, like its former leader, Baruch Marzel, were followers of Meir Kahane’s Kach Party. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 24 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994, was a Kach member at that time.

On February 11th Netanyahu tweeted:

The Jewish home, Jewish Power, Eli Yishai, and the National Union must unite to save 6-8 seats to the right-wing bloc. We must not lose these votes because the split on the right will lead to a loss in the elections and the establishment of a leftist government. None of them alone does pass the threshold, uniting them will bring at least 6-8 seats.

Just over a week later, his efforts proved successful. The Jewish Home and Otzma Yehudit agreed to run together in Israel's upcoming elections in exchange for Netanyahu promising Jewish Home two ministerial positions in the next government and a slot on the Likud party list.

This may seem like a political puppet show, or familiar political horse-trading. But it isn't.

It shows how far to the right the Israeli right has gone.

Betzalel Smotrich, an MK for Jewish Home who famously organized the "Beast Parade" as protest to the Pride Parade in Jerusalem and has declared his support for segregating Jews and Arabs, not only in settlements, but also in hospitals, tweeting, "It is natural that my wife would not want to lay down next to someone who just gave birth to a baby that might want to murder her baby in another 20 years," could be the post-election minister of education.

Moti Yogev, another Jewish Home MK, said that Israel's Supreme Court should be razed with a bulldozer. And now, Jewish Home has merged with Otzma Yehudit - who are even more extreme.

Yes, there have always been extremist elements in the Israeli political sphere, but they have always been outcasts. When Meir Kahane got elected, MP tried to impeach him, and when he spoke at the Knesset, MKs would leave the plenum in protest.

These days, Netanyahu isn’t only failing to condemn right-wing extremism; he is working to strengthen it, to endorse it taking its place in the halls of the Knesset, to let its members incite there. Netanyahu is effectively providing the most violent elements in the Israeli society political immunity.

It’s not that the extreme, religious right has gotten closer to Netanyahu, but Netanyahu has become the face of the extreme right. Netanyahu likes to be compared to Churchill, but a comparison to an early Slobodan Milosevic is more appropriate.

In his early years, Milosevic wasn’t considered extreme, but he gave free reign for extreme movements in Serbia for his own cynical reasons, until he identified a moment of crisis and propelled one of the twentieth century's most brutal regimes.

This is a moment of crisis for Israel as a liberal democracy, but it is just as much a moment of crisis, and a test, for American Jews.

How can there be so much discussion of "Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism" when Israel’s prime minister invites anti-Semites to dinner?

How can U.S. Jews stand up against Trump and for human rights when they support an Israeli government that is actively supporting racism, segregation, intolerance, and bigotry, against its Arab population and all who uphold liberal values?

Will U.S. Jews keep inviting and respecting a prime minister who advocates for the inclusion of fascists and racists within his government, and annoints their hatred as acceptable political speech?

Will American Jews embrace a government against which they would stand up with all their might if it was their government?

Sometimes, we are defined by what we reject. Let this be that moment.

Etan Nechin is an Israeli-born journalist, author, and online editor for The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature. Twitter: @Etanetan23

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1.6957998Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:48:41Aya Chajut Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:45:45Kobi Marimi's "Home" has been chosen as the song to represent Israel in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest taking place in Tel Aviv in May.

The 27-year-old Marimi was elected in February, winning the honor after coming in first place in the reality television show "The Next Star."

Unlike last year's "Toy," a fast-paced pop song, Israel's 2019 nominee will present a ballad, to be revealed on March 10.

The song was written and composed by Ohad Shargai and Inbar Weitzman, both previous contenders on Israeli reality shows.

Two hundred songs were submitted to the selection committee, including ones written by well-known Israeli musicians such as Keren Peles and Shiri Maimon. Doron Madali, the man behind "Toy," last year's sensation which won Israel the song contest, did not submit a song this year.

The committee convened Tuesday to listen to a shortlist of submitted songs, which Marimi had recorded.

Marimi said that from the first time he heard the song, he found it very touching and connected to it immediately. He thanked the committee for choosing a song "that fits me to a T," adding that in several days "everyone will be able to be moved by it together with me."

Marimi will perform the selected song on May 18 in the Eurovision finals, which Israel automatically qualifies for since it won last year's contest, granting the country hosting rights.

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1.6957403Thu, 21 Feb 2019 13:18:36Jonathan Lis וChaim LevinsonThu, 21 Feb 2019 13:18:38Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's two biggest rivals on the center-left announced early Thursday morning that they have decided to join forces and merge their parties, causing a political shakeup ahead of the Israeli ballot slated for April 9.

Hosen L'Yisrael chairman Benny Gantz and Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid have agreed to run on a joint ticket th

at will be called "Blue and White." They have also enlisted former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lt. General (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi to join their unified party.

Ashkenazi was Gantz’s immediate predecessor at the most senior position in the Israeli military.

The deal struck between the two party leaders means that Gantz would be prime minister for two and a half years, with Lapid becoming prime minister after that, if they form the next government. According to the agreement, while Gantz serves as prime minister, Lapid would receive the Foerign Ministry and former Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon would receive the Defense Ministry. Yesh Atid will receive 13 slots in the first 30 while Hosen L'Yisrael will receive 13 and Ya'alon's party Telem will receive three.

With Thursday being the deadline for the submission of party slates ahead of the April 9 Knesset election, Gantz met with Lapid on Wednesday in an attempt to reach an agreement to run on a joint ticket.

Number three on the merged roster is Ya'alon, who launched his own party when elections were initially announced but then joined Gantz.

Polls published in recent weeks put Gantz as Netanyahu's main rival in the upcoming election, with some predicting that a joint Gantz-Lapid ticket could overtake Likud. The most recent poll on February 18 projects Hosen L’Yisrael with 18 seats, Yesh Atid with 12 and Likud with 30. A Gantz-Lapid merger was projected to get 32 seats and leave Likud with 31. Meanwhile, 36 percent of those polled said they preferred to see Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, while 31 percent said Gantz.

Likud issued a statement Thursday morning blasting the union: "The choice is clear: It's either a left-wing government headed by Lapid and Gantz and supported by a bloc of Arab parties, or a right-wing government headed by Netanyahu."

Attempts to form a competing bloc on the right

The announcement on Thursday morning came less than 24 hours after the news that Israeli far-right party Habayit Hayehudi had accepted an offer from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, a right-wing party led by followers of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, in exchange for the education and housing ministries in addition to two seats in the security cabinet.

Likud and Habayit Hayehudi said in a joint statement that during the election campaign the parties will not attack one another "but rather will strengthen one another for the sake of the right-wing victory."

Netanyahu said that "the next election is between a left-wing government headed by Lapid and Gantz and a right-wing government headed by me." Habayit Hayehudi, he said, "acted responsibly and managed to close ranks to ensure right-wing votes don't go to waste."

Otzma Yehudit is led by former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari, together with Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein, all former disciples and political descendants of Meir Kahane – the infamous American-rabbi-turned-Knesset-member whose vitriolic racism against Arabs got his Kach party banned from running in the 1988 election.

In response to Hosen L'Yisrael and Yesh Atid's merger, Naftali Bennett, co-founder of the new right-wing party Hayamin Hehadash, called on Netanyahu to seek to forge a joint slate to include the prime minister's Likud, former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu, the Kulanu party of Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and the far-right Zehut party, which is headed by former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin.

"In light of the unity on the left, I call on Netanyahu to call on Feiglin, Kahlon and Lieberman to unite with them into a large bloc to avoid losing any seats," Bennett said, referring to the prospect that the parties indiividually might fall below the minimum four seats for Knesset representation. "This is the leadership that is required of him, and now he has to do this daring act."

Yisrael Beiteinu said the merger "lacked any agenda, ideology or care for the simple citizen" while Shas said the merger was "dangerous for Judaism." In a statement, the party said: "Gantz, who supports civil marriage and public transportation on Shabbat, has aligned with Lapid whose hatred for Judaism and for religious people is his job." Shas chairman Arye Dery vowed to not sit in Gantz's government.

Also, on Wednesday Gesher party chairwoman Orli Levi-Abekasis announced would run independently. Levi-Abekasis had met with Gantz to discuss the possibility of running together but later accused Gantz of violating their agreement.

"The idea of joining Gesher to Hosen L'Yisrael was presented to me by Mr. Gantz in our first meeting," Levi-Abekasis said, adding that the two had agreed on key social issues as an ideological basis for a partnership.

On Tuesday, Gantz and Lapid spoke by phone and called publicly for the talks between the parties to be intensified. Gantz addressed the topic of a possible joint ticket Tuesday at an event at which he announced his party's own slate.

“Immediately after this conference is over, I will call my friend Yair Lapid and ask him to meet me tonight. I will ask him again to put every other consideration aside, and together to put Israel before everything. You don’t weaken the opportunity for historic change over arguments about work assignments.”

Lapid later responded to Gantz by saying: “As I said yesterday on stage [at a party rally], we will turn over every stone, we will do everything so as not to miss a historic opportunity to change the government.”

The man was taken into custody on Tuesday night, French police said Wednesday. Police said he is a salesman from the eastern Alsace region, France 24 reported. He is under investigation for “public insult based on origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.”

Finkielkraut, 69, has expressed support in the past for the social movement. His philosophical writing mostly discusses identity-based violence, including anti-Semitism.

The Yellow Vests began in the fall as a series of protests against a hike on fuel prices but has been mired since in countless instances of violence against police and a substantial amount of anti-Semitic hate speech.

On Tuesday, France held rallies across the country against anti-Semitism there. Hours earlier, nearly 100 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in the eastern Alsace region were discovered vandalized with swastikas.

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1.6956726Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:40:36Kunwar Khuldune ShahidThu, 21 Feb 2019 12:40:55Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have got the cold shoulder from protesting crowds in Tunisia and been publicly sidelined at the G20 conference last November, but he was treated to a hero’s welcome in Pakistan this week.

It was more of a savior’s welcome, bearing in mind the financial lifeline he threw to Prime Minister Imran Khan. And that aid was part of a significant bargain struck between Islamabad and Riyadh.

>> China Is Now Pakistan's Partner in Jihadist Terror

Khan has acquiesced to MBS’ pointed demand: to join the Sunni Muslim axis against Iran. That formalization of an anti-Tehran alliance that Pakistan has previously hesitated to endorse will have ripple effects both within Pakistan, and across the region.

The first leg of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Asia tour saw him strike $20 billion worth of deals in Pakistan. The financing comes as much needed relief for Islamabad, which is looking to dodge a thirteenth International Monetary Fund bailout amid a balance of payment crisis that is crippling the economy.

During the two day trip that culminated on Monday, MBS further provided diplomatic support to Islamabad at a tense period of relations with India due to last week’s bombing in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed over 40 Indian security officials.

Just as India threatens war in retaliation, assurances Pakistan received from both Saudi Arabia and China bolstered its decision that there was no need to go after Jaish-e-Mohammad, the terror group that took responsibility, and whose leadership is still living openly inside Pakistan.

Where China has reiterated it has no plans to reconsider its veto on the move to designate JeM Chief Masood Azhar a terrorist by the United Nations, Saudi Arabia’s joint statement with Pakistan following MBS’s visit highlighted the need to "avoid politicization of the UN listing regime."

MBS’s financial and diplomatic support comes in exchange for Pakistan’s increased involvement in the so-called Islamic Counter Terrorism Military Coalition (IMCTC). Islamabad was informed about its new role by former Army Chief General (retired) Raheel Sharif – who now commands the IMCTC – in the lead up to the MBS visit.

The IMCTC was formed in December 2015, nine months into Saudi military campaign in Yemen. At the time Riyadh was planning the execution of influential Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, which brought Saudi Arabia and Iran to a standoff, leading to a severing of diplomatic ties.

It also coincided with the peak of the Islamic State (ISIS)’s powers in Iraq and Syria, confident enough even to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia. That synchronicity gave the IMCTC cover as a military alliance designed to counter ISIS, disguising its counter-Iran aims, with the obvious feel-good factor of an unprecedented formation of Muslim states uniting to fight a group orchestrating Islamist terrorism across the world.

Three years later, however, ISIS has been largely eliminated in the Middle East, even before the IMCTC could become operational. And so the coalition, with a predominantly Sunni membership making it a mere extension of the "Arab NATO," needs a new cover for its actual goals of countering Iranian influence in the region.

The window of opportunity is narrow: Saudi Arabia must exploit the remaining lifetime of the Trump administration and its staunch anti-Iran posture, embodied by the U.S. pullout from the Iran nuclear deal, and the economic benefits of US-backed sanctions on Iranian oil.

Pakistan holds a key position in the Saudi plan. Not only is Pakistan’s military expertise critical for the sustenance of IMCTC, its location as Iran’s neighbor has geostrategic significance.

Where Saudi Arabia’s $10 billion oil refinery in the port city of Gwadar will provide the finance and energy lifeline to Pakistan, its location in Balochistan, bordering Iran, sparks obvious military apprehensions in Tehran.

To make Pakistan an integral part of its case against Tehran, MBS is also looking to paint as a potential victim of "Iranian terrorism." This was evident is Saudi State Minister for Foreign Affairs Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir calling Iran the "world’s chief sponsor of terrorism" sitting next to the Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in Islamabad on Monday.

That explicitly anti-Iran rhetoric is being voiced in Pakistan in the presence of the most senior Pakistani ministers and with their tacit sanction underlines that Islamabad has now formally aligned itself against Tehran.

Practically, however, this has been the case since Pakistan decided to join the IMCTC in 2016, and gave the green light for its former army chief to command it.

Tehran has already reacted to the newly hostile tone. On Saturday, Tehran said Islamabad would "pay a high price" for last week’s attack on its Revolutionary Guards alleging that Pakistan provides safe havens to Jaish-al-Adl, the group which has regularly orchestrated attacks in Iran. Tehran has threatened retaliatory action in the past for what it considers deliberately lax border security.

Just as Islamabad gave MBS an anti-Iran podium, Tehran is echoing claims often made by India: that Pakistan provides a safe haven for to jihadists and fails to take action against militants crossing the border to launch attacks on neighboring territories. That identification with its arch-enemy naturally makes Pakistan’s alignment against Iran easier.

Popular opinion in Pakistan has not been overly enthusiastic to signing up the Saudi side in its Middle East conflicts. Three years ago, the National Assembly even adopted a resolution against the country’s military involvement in Yemen.

The fact that Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia population in the world has also been a concern for its rulers every time they’ve been asked to become party to Saudi foreign policy priorities.

There are more ramifications for the ruling party, Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), which has a significant vote bank among the Shia community. The leadership of its main rival, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) are widely considered to be Saudi shills, since Riyadh provided former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif refuge in the aftermath of the 1999 military coup.

But the tide is turning. None of this discomfort was visible in the almost hagiographic coverage of MBS’s Pakistan trip, with the local media churning out panegyric supplements dedicated to the Saudi Crown Prince. Even the opposition leadership wholeheartedly welcomed MBS; there was a scramble to take credit for the deals signed with Saudi Arabia.

And unlike in Tunisia or the G20, neither the global outrage over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi nor Saudi war crimes in Yemen were even whispered as concerns.

That’s less surprising. Given the country’s own disregard for them, there usually isn’t much outrage in Pakistan over human rights violations – unless Muslims are at the receiving end from a non-Muslim regime. Of course, there’s an exception for superpower allies: Pakistan has not commented on China’s persecution of Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region bordering Pakistan.

Indeed, Islamabad might be entering a prolonged era of enforced silence on the human rights abuses exercised by China and Saudi Arabia, with the two countries looking set to protect their investments in Pakistan by providing diplomatic support on the international stage.

On the Saudi side, that back up won’t be entirely watertight. While China already considers India a major rival, Saudi Arabia won’t feel any compulsion to compromise its growing trade relations with India for the sake of pacifying Pakistan, and might even issue vague statements against cross-border terrorism for New Delhi’s consumption.

Pakistan is clearly relinquishing not inconsiderable control over its foreign policy and military resources, and reaffirming its diminished status as a client state of both superpowers. But Imran Khan’s government clearly assesses that’s a small price to pay for economic salvation and the gift of solid cover to continue to nourish jihadists as key geostrategic assets.

Pakistan has made itself significant enough to be bailed out by China and Saudi Arabia, both financially and diplomatically. Now Islamabad will be hoping it can play both powers to its advantage, and that Riyadh and Beijing cooperate for influence over Pakistan, rather than fighting a zero sum contest for exclusivity.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a Pakistan-based journalist and a correspondent at The Diplomat. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, Foreign Policy, Courrier International, New Statesman, The Telegraph , MIT Review, and Arab News among other publications. Twitter: @khuldune

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1.6957510Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:37:58ReutersThu, 21 Feb 2019 12:35:06U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday a woman born in the United States who joined the Islamic State militant group did not qualify for U.S. citizenship and had no legal basis to return to the country.

Hoda Muthana, 24, traveled to Syria over four years ago to join Islamic State, also known as ISIS. She married a succession of Islamic State fighters and went on Twitter to encourage attacks on the West.

In media interviews this week from a detention camp in Syria, Muthana said she was sorry for her actions and wanted to return to her family in Alabama with her toddler son.

>> The rise and fall of ISIS: From organization to state | Analysis

Pompeo said Muthana was not a U.S. citizen and would not be admitted into the United States.

“She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States,” Pompeo said in a statement.

President Donald Trump said on Twitter he had directed Pompeo “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!”

Pompeo’s statement did not explain why the State Department did not consider Muthana a U.S. citizen.

The action followed Britain’s move to revoke the citizenship of a teenager after she joined Islamic State, citing security concerns.

14th Amendment

The U.S. Department of State did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but U.S. officials appeared to be basing their position on an exception in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Muthana’s father was a Yemeni diplomat, working in the United States. Children born in the United States to accredited diplomats, under the 14th Amendment, do not acquire citizenship since they are not “born ... subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Hassan Shibly, a representative for the Muthana family and a staff member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, tweeted that she was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, in October 1994, months after her father informed the U.S. government he was no longer a diplomat.

Charles Swift, director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, said her father’s revocation of his diplomatic status meant Hoda Muthana was a U.S. citizen. Swift said he planned to file a lawsuit over her case.

The handover was the first of several, two Iraqi military sources told Reuters, under an agreement brokered to handover a total of 502 fighters.

The village of Baghouz at the Iraqi border is the last scrap of territory left to the Islamic State in the Euphrates valley region that became its final stronghold in Iraq and Syria after a series of defeats in 2017.

>> Read more: The rise and fall of ISIS: From organization to state | Analysis ■ ISIS used promise of rape to lure recruits with history of sexual violence, report says ■ After ISIS loses its capital, focus turns to strengthening global terror network | Analysis

"The majority of the fighters are Iraqi," said a military colonel whose unit is stationed at the Syrian border. "But we have a few foreigners."

The mayor of Iraqi border town Al-Qaim, Ahmed al-Mahallawi, said some fighters' families were also transferred.

"Early this morning, 10 trucks loaded with Daesh fighters and their families were handed over by SDF forces to the Iraqi army," he said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

"The majority of them are Iraqis and the convoy was under maximum security protection headed to the Jazeera and Badiya military headquarters." Both bases are located in Anbar province.

The SDF and the U.S.-backed coalition could not immediately be reached for comment.

News of the handover came as U.S.-backed forces were readying for an assault on the militant group's final enclave in eastern Syria. The last civilians are expected to be evacuated on Thursday, to clear the way for the assault, the SDF said.

Around 800 of foreign jihadist fighters who joined Islamic State, including many Iraqis, are being held in Syria by the SDF, the group said. More than 2,000 family members are also in camps, with dozens more arriving each day.

Their fate has become more pressing in recent days as U.S.-backed fighters planned their assault to capture the last remnants of the group's self-styled caliphate.

On Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said Iraq was carefully monitoring the situation at its Syrian border amid concerns that the remaining Islamic State fighters could stream across the border.

The militant group still poses a threat in Iraq and some western officials believe that the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, may still be hiding there.

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1.6957509Thu, 21 Feb 2019 12:21:01ReutersThu, 21 Feb 2019 12:20:22Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif accused Israel of engaging in “adventurism” with its bombing campaigns in Syria and said he could not rule out the possibility of a military conflict between the countries.

Zarif told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that Iran was in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government, while Israel was violating Lebanese and Syrian air space, as well as international law.

>> Read more: In the glass house called Syria, Iran has thrown one too many stones | Analysis

“There is adventurism on Israel’s side, and adventurism is always dangerous,” Zarif told the newspaper in an interview to be published on Thursday.

Asked if he saw an emerging military conflict between Iran and Israel, Zarif said, “I do not, but we cannot exclude the possibility.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks in Syria over the past several years and will ramp up its fight following the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.

Israel is trying to counter the influence carved out in Syria by Iran, which has supported Syrian President Bashar Assad in the war that erupted in 2011. It said Tehran’s actions are the main destabilizing factor in the Middle East.

Zarif, speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday, accused Israel of looking for war and warned that its actions and those of the United States were increasing the chances of a clash in the region.

The two parties, Yesh Atid and Hosen L'Yisrael, will run on a joint slate in the upcoming election. If the parties form the next government, then Gantz will be prime minister for the first two and a half years of the term and then Lapid will assume the role for the second half.

The parties also announced that former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Lt. General (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi, will join the slate. Moshe Ya’alon, the former defense minister and head of the Telem party, will be in the third spot on the joint list and most likely Ashkenazi will follow him in the fourth spot, with Histadrut labor federation chairman Avi Nissenkorn in the fifth slot on the combined Knesset slate.

Ashkenazi is considered to be a particularly strong figure for the new, united party. Recent polls show that he can tip the balance of power between the two major electoral blocs and his presence on the joint Knesset slate could shift votes from the right-wing bloc to the center – and significantly raise the chances of his party forming the next government.

Are other parties expected to join Gantz and Lapid at the last minute?

It seems unlikely that others will join, but the deadline for any changes is 10 P.M. on Thursday, the latest the parties can file their slates for the election with the Central Elections Committee. Until then, anything is possible.

Gantz had negotiated with Gesher party chairwoman Orly Levi-Abekasis in recent weeks, but on Wednesday she announced her party would run on its own in the April 9 election. “It is so disappointing to see that the man who heralded new and clean politics has failed in his first test: The test of truth,” said Levi-Abekasis. Still, she has not yet submitted her slate to the Elections Committee – but the merger between Gantz and Lapid has closed the door on her because legally she is unable to run together with an existing party after she split off from Yisrael Beiteinu.

What are Gantz and Lapid trying to achieve by uniting their parties?

The goal is to win as many votes as possible from the right-wing bloc and increase the number of center-left Knesset seats, enabling Gantz to form the next government as prime minister.

Who will lose from the merger?

The new party’s campaign could seriously harm Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party, which is teetering on the brink of not passing the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent and entering the Knesset. A number of “soft-right” voters could be pulled in from Likud and also Habayit Hayehudi, after the latter party agreed to a controversial joint slate with the far-right Otzma Yehudit.

Who will profit from the new joint party?

A campaign with a limited right-wing character by the new party could strengthen the left-wing parties Labor and Meretz because some left-wing voters, who will not identify with the new message, might abandon Gantz and Lapid. Labor and Meretz have both reached new lows of support in recent weeks, keeping only their die-hard supporters who would not leave them for any other party. Since its primary, Labor has recovered a little in the polls and some polls show the party as rebounding to 10 Knesset seats.

Will the union affect the distribution of votes within the large political blocs?

Because of the expected movement of voters from the right to the center-left bloc, and voters from the center to the left-wing parties, left-wing voters could well strengthen the new party hoping to change the government and replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However it is still unclear at this stage whether the move will redistribute the votes between the two main political blocs.

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1.6957318Thu, 21 Feb 2019 11:02:54Shirli SitbonThu, 21 Feb 2019 11:02:55PARIS — Growing anti-Semitism has been the key topic for nearly two decades at the annual dinner organized by the umbrella organization of French Jewish community organizations known by its French initials, the CRIF. The subject has been at the top of the agenda since 2000, when what has been dubbed the “new anti-Semitism,” often surfacing among radicalized Muslims and coming on top of hatred expressed by the far right, first appeared.

French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the issue at this year’s CRIF dinner on Wednesday in the wake of several anti-Semitic incidents, which included swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans painted on some 100 Jewish graves in the eastern village of Quatzenheim and verbal abuse directed at French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.

Macron said that France is adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which has not been adopted by any French political party, and that the government will “significantly increase” funding for the national Holocaust memorial.

The French president also said that he had instructed the education minister to probe schools that have seen students being pulled out by their parents over fears of anti-Semitism.

He further said that people convicted of anti-Semitism would be banned from social media and that websites would be forced to delete hateful messages immediately.

Macron visited the Holocaust memorial in Paris and the Quatzenheim cemetery on Tuesday.

“We had never thought this could happen in our village,” a Jewish resident of Quatzenheim told Macron. “This can happen everywhere and it shouldn’t happen anywhere!” the French president replied. “We will act, we will pass legislation, we will punish.”

Macron isn’t the first French leader to address the issue. His predecessors, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, and then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls introduced plans to fight anti-Semitism, including school programs and legislation. French hate crime legislation provides for punishment that is double that of the same offense that is not motivated by hate, but the number of anti-Semitic incidents continues to climb.

New government figures show that there were 541 anti-Semitic incidents in France last year, a 74 percent increase over 2017. Some Jewish leaders have said that French authorities need to change their approach.

“Institutions in charge of fighting anti-Semitism have been using the same general methods for all types of hate crimes and that has proven ineffectual,” Francis Kalifat, the president of the CRIF, told Haaretz. “Different types of hate crimes — anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia — are carried out by different people for various reasons and each type of hatred should be targeted specifically,” he said.

Other religious leaders have expressed similar views, but French Rabbi Michel Serfaty, the founder of the French Jewish Muslim Friendship Association, said the authorities don’t need to change direction. Instead they need to intensify their efforts.

“Obviously anti-Semitism is still high, but that’s because it’s a long-term fight. It will take two generations to beat,” he told Haaretz. “You can’t give up. It’s like being on a battlefield.”

Thousands of French Jews have left for Israel in recent years and community leaders say they themselves have worked hard to maintain a diverse Jewish community in France. “It’s not only that many people have left. The problem is that those who have left were the most active members of the community,” said Joel Mergui, who heads the Jewish community’s Consistoire, the organization that oversees France’s synagogues and Jewish schools. “Our temporary solution is what I call ‘internal aliya’ — enlisting Jews who were not very active in the community into more demanding positions. But if more Jews leave, we will struggle to keep Jewish life as rich as it is today.”

Although the Jewish community and the French press have given considerable attention to those who have left France, they rarely mention Jews who have immigrated to Israel but then returned to France. “We’ll see how thing develop here and if they get any worse, we’ll leave,” said Jocelyne, a 45-year-old customer at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket at the edge of Paris that was the scene of a terrorist attack in 2015. “I have sent my children to Israel, however. There’s no future for them in France,” she said.

“Anti-Semitism has pushed me to wear my kippa [skullcap] more often. It made me embrace my identity,” said Jean-Bernard, “but I don’t think we should surrender to terrorism. I’m not afraid. Making aliya is a personal religious move. You shouldn’t go to Israel to flee anti-Semitism.”

Last week the Paris Jewish community witnessed the vandalism of a memorial to Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Jewish man abducted and killed by a gang in 2006. Halimi is officially considered the first Jew killed in an anti-Semitic attack in recent decades. A tree planted in his memory in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, where he was found following the attack, was chopped down and another was damaged just days before an annual ceremony marking Halimi’s death.

“They want to assassinate Ilan Halimi a second time,” said the town’s mayor, Frédéric Petitta.”This year, in addition to the sadness and grief, we feel disgust and anger over what has happened.

The town has planted new trees at the memorial with local junior high students participating in the ceremony.”

“Children are crucial in the fight against anti-Semitism and intolerance,” said former Mayor Olivier Léonhardt. “Firstly, children are much more open-minded than other segments of the population. And second, they have influence. People around them listen to what they have to say.”

“Fighting anti-Semitism is a constant effort. Whenever I hear anyone making an anti-Semitic comment or implying something, I call them out,” said 62-year-old Marie-Hélène, whose husband and children are Jewish. But her friend Chantal added: “I’m not as optimistic as you are. I think the situation will only get worse, and France’s Jews are doomed.”

Israeli venture capital firm Jerusalem Venture Partners said on Wednesday it closed a new fund with investment commitments of $220 million from investors from the United States, Europe and Asia, including sovereign wealth funds, corporations, insurance companies and university endowments. JVP had originally planned to raise just $160 million but increased the takings amid huge demand from investors. The JVP VIII fund is investing in early-to-mid-stage startups in computer vision, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and big data. Several of the companies are U.S.-Israeli or European-Israeli, JVP founder and Executive Chairman Erel Margalit said. “It’s a sign that the next generation of Israeli companies doesn’t just want to be bought by multinationals but wants to create its own international business leadership,” Margalit said. JVP, which has investment hubs in Jerusalem, the southern Israeli city of Beersheba and a new one in New York, has raised $1.4 billion to date in nine funds. (Irad Atzmon Schmayer)

Alooma acquired by Google Cloud for an estimated $150 million

Just hours after Palo Alto Networks said it was acquiring Israeli startup Demisto, Google Cloud revealed on Tuesday that it was buying Israel’s Alooma. The U.S. company didn’t reveal the price it was paying for Alooma, which helps corporate customers migrate their data to the cloud, but sources estimated it is $150 million. “The addition of Alooma … is a natural fit that allows us to offer customers a streamlined, automated migration experience to Google Cloud, and give them access to our full range of database services,” Google executives Amit Ganesh and Dominic Preuss said in a blog post. Alooma was formed in 2013 by Yoni Broyde, Yair Weinberger and Rami Amar, three alumni of the Israel Defense Forces’ elite Talpiot academic program. The company reported raising $15 million in 2016 from the U.S. venture funds Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners and is believed to have raised another $5 million from Israel’s Vintage Venture Partners. (Ruti Levy)

BiomX raises $32 million for acne, irritable bowel treatments

Israeli biopharma firm BiomX said on Wednesday that it raised $32 million in a private funding round that will primarily be used to advance the company’s drug candidates for the treatment of acne and inflammatory bowel disease. The round was led by existing investors OrbiMed, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC Inc, Takeda Ventures, 8VC, MiraeAsset, Seventure Partners’ Health for Life Capital I and SBI Japan-Israel Innovation Fund. They were joined by additional European investors and new investors, BiomX said. “The new funding will enable us to transition BiomX to a clinical stage company as our lead programs in acne and IBD — both novel phage therapeutics targeting harmful bacteria in the microbiome — enter the clinic,” said BiomX CEO Jonathan Solomon. BiomX will also continue to advance its liver disease and colorectal cancer programs by identifying key bacteria driving these diseases and developing phage cocktails against them, he added. (Reuters)

Aeronautics, the troubled maker of military drones, is being sold to the state-owned arms maker Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and businessman Avihai Stolero for 850 million shekels ($235 million), Aeronautics said on Wednesday. The parties signed terms for the all-cash deal Wednesday morning but still face opposition from Aharon Frenkel. While Frenkel has amassed a 30% stake in Aeronautics, sources said shareholders were expected to approve the deal. The 15.36 shekels a share purchase price is double that of Aeronautics’ average price in the 30 days prior to Rafael’s offer on January 13, but since then, the price has soared, closing on Wednesday at 14.88 shekels, up 3% for the day. Rafael and Stolero will each kick in half the purchase price and share control of Aeronautics equally. Two weeks ago, Israel’s Defense Ministry ended its suspension of Aeronautics’ marketing and export license to an unnamed overseas customer but a ban still applies to two company executives. (Guy Erez)

Housing & Construction reaches agreement to buy American builder

Under its new Israeli-American controlling shareholder, Naty Saidoff, Housing & Construction Limited has finally gotten a major foothold in the U.S. market. The company said on Wednesday that it had reached a deal to buy Infrastructure & Industrial Construction USA (I+icon) from a group led by private equity fund FdG Capital Partners for what market sources estimated was between $30 million and $40 million. Saidoff sees H&C’s future growth engine in the United States, a market he knows well from his years as a Los Angeles-based developer. “The owners of H&C have successfully operated for more than 40 years in the U.S. market, so we are confident that the acquisition will be successfully integrated into the company’s existing operations in America,” said Chairman Tamir Chen. I+icon USA has turnover of about $225 million annually and is focused on the East Coast states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Florida. H&C shares closed up 4.45% at 6.60 shekels ($1.83) on Wednesday. (Shelly Appelberg)

Teva reaches settlement with U.S. on ‘pay-for-delay’ drug deals

The United States government has reached a settlement with Teva Pharmaceuticals over charges that its agreements with rivals impeded consumer access to lower-priced generic drugs. The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday said it had settled three reverse payment fights with units of Teva, which will be barred from making similar agreements in the future. “This broad settlement prevents the world’s largest manufacturer of generic drugs from entering into collusive agreements that prevent price competition by keeping generic drugs off the market,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. The FTC has opposes so-called “pay for delay” settlements, in which a brand-name drug maker pays or otherwise compensates a generic rival to delay releasing a cheaper version of its product. The FTC believes the practice is a violation of antitrust law and fought one case to the Supreme Court. Teva shares closed down 2.2% Wednesday at 63.63 shekels ($17.60). (Reuters)

Delek in advanced talks to sell Phoenix to U.S. fund Centerbridge

Israel’s Delek Group said on Tuesday that it was in advanced talks to sell its remaining 30% stake in insurer Phoenix Holdings for 1.6 billion shekels ($442 million). Yitzhak Tshuva’s holding company didn’t identify the potential buyer, but it is reportedly the U.S. private equity fund Centerbridge Partners. Centerbridge executives are expected to arrive in Israel next week to sign an agreement and meet with regulators. Delek faces an end-the-year deadline under the Business Concentration Law to divest its Phoenix stake, but earlier efforts to sell the insurer to American and Chinese buyers fell through in the face of regulatory opposition. In recent months, Delek has been divesting small stakes in Phoenix, one of Israel’s largest insurance companies, reducing its holding by 20 percentage points. Shares of Phoenix, whose market cap is about the same as the Centerbridge deal values the company, ended up 3.4% at 21.16 shekels Wednesday. (Assa Sasson and Michael Rochvarger)

Bezeq and B Comm pace gains for Tel Aviv shares

Tel Aviv shares rose on Wednesday as Bezeq and its B Communications parent company rallied. The benchmark TA-35 index finished the day up 0.6% at 1,578.36 points, while the TA-125 added nearly 0.7% to 1,436.34, on turnover of 1.2 billion shekels ($330 million). Bezeq was the volume leader and rose 5% to 3.30 shekels while B Com led gains for TA-125 companies with a 7.25% rise to 17.15. Melisron rose 1.1% to 1.78, even though the mall owner and developer reported a 25% drop in 2018 profit to 631 million shekels. ILDC rose 1.8% to 28.57 after it agreed to sell its Rimon hotel chain to Dan Hotels for 225 million shekels. Electreon, whose rally yielded a market cap of as much as 800 million shekels, tumbled 9.7% to close a Wednesday close of 64.57. Hadera Paper dropped 5.6% to 286.40. (Assa Sasson)

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1.6957039Thu, 21 Feb 2019 07:24:45Sami PeretzThu, 21 Feb 2019 07:24:37Avi Nissenkorn, the union chief who joined Benny Gantz’s Hosen L’Yisrael this week, will have the No. 3 spot on the party’s election list and be its chief spokesman on socioeconomic issues. That aroused concerns that if Hosen L’Yisrael forms the next government, Israeli economic policy will tilt sharply to the left.

As a career official in the Histadrut labor federation and its chairman since 2014, Nissenkorn has already colored Hosen L’Yisrael with a socialist tinge. In a Gantz government, Nissenkorn could easily emerge as Israel’s next finance minister.

Perhaps that’s why in an interview with TheMarker, excerpts of which appear below, he reiterated his support for free markets even when the question didn’t relate to that.

Asked if his leadership position in the party will raised fears about “socialism,” Nissenkorn responded: “I am a man of balance. It’s important to me that the economy is free and stable. I am a very responsible person who studies things before I act on them.”

Nissenkorn’s decision to join Hosen L’Yisrael breaks a long-standing link between the Histadrut and the Labor Party. It had appeared to be in force as the labor federation and Nissenkorn himself took an active role in Labor’s primary a few days earlier.

It also came as a surprise because Nissenkorn had formed a good working relationship with Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who is also chairman of the Kulanu Party. But for Nissenkorn, neither is a viable partner – both are doing poorly in the polls and Kahlon is a declared ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Nissenkorn wants to see out of power.

“He is worn out, he mixes his personal interests with the state’s. His way leads nowhere, we have to look for unity and not division,” Nissenkorn said.

You have spoken about reducing income inequality, but according to the Gini index inequality has actually shrunk over the last decade. Doesn’t Netanyahu deserve the credit?

“When Netanyahu was finance minister [in 2003-05] , the Gini index was at a high of 0.39 – and the gaps had become extreme. In the last few years we have succeeded in lowering the index to 0.35, despite the prime minister’s policies. There are still high levels of inequality and poverty because of policies that Netanyahu has led.

“We need to find a way that the economy will grow, be free, encourage entrepreneurship and enjoy high levels of productivity, but on the other hand will have compassion and respect the working person and worry about the middle class.”

But will inequality has shrunk and the unemployment rate is just 4%. Isn’t that somehow connected with Netanyahu?

“The cost of living has reached crazy levels during the decade he was prime minister, Housing prices are at record highs because of him – he is responsible and didn’t do anything to solve it. Israel is 15% more expensive on average than other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and too many people are in poverty.

“Thanks to my undertakings, like raising the minimum wage and allowances for the handicapped, inequality is falling. None of these undertakings was taken at the initiative of the prime minister.”

Kahlon has called Nissenkorn a man of the left when it comes to political issues. How would you characterize yourself?

“I’m a centrist when it comes to politics. National security comes first but at the same time we must have hope and see whether we can reach a political settlement [with the Palestinians]. Right now, we need to see how we can build confidence and develop confidence-building measures that will improve the condition of the Palestinian population.”

Yoaz Hendel, another Hosen L’Yisrael candidate, has described the party’s position as advocating compassionate capitalism. Is that how you would define it?

“I wouldn’t define it as capitalism with compassion. Our vision is a free market that gives room for free enterprise and growing GDP – side by side with a compassionate balance and concern for the weakest sectors of the population. A counterweight to market failure.”

Is it a given that if Gantz forms the next government, you will be given the finance portfolio?

“No. Who knows how the coalition will look. I agreed with him that I would get a senior economic portfolio. We didn’t discuss which and it wouldn’t be wise to speak about which one before we have a map of the coalition.

“On the matter of capabilities, I have them for any and all senior economic portfolios. It’s clear that I would prefer the treasury.”

Let’s say you get a senior economic portfolio. You have a 10 billion shekel ($2.8 billion) budget shortfall for this year and next. How will you address it? Increase the deficit, raise taxes, cut spending?

“It would be wrong to relate to this. Assuming I am finance minister …. on my first day in office I will meet with senior staff and develop perspectives and targets, after that I’ll have an answer for you.”

Do you have any answers for what to do about the high cost of living?

“The high cost of living comes from two places – housing and food. It’s clear that the solution regarding food is to continue the policies of injecting more competition into the market. But we also need to examine all the links in the chain that lead to high prices for the consumer. This is a serious market failure which is hard to understand, much less cope with. There’s no magic solution.”

And housing?

“Also with housing there is no magic solution. We need to build all over the country and find solutions for the weakest. Massive construction will create market forces that will bring down home prices. We also have to ensure that state-owned land is sold at low prices.”

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1.6957399Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:39:09Amos BidermanThu, 21 Feb 2019 05:37:21https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/turkey/erdogan-warns-that-turkey-alone-cannot-withstand-another-wave-of-refugees-1.6957304
1.6957304Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:31:03Zvi Bar'elWed, 20 Feb 2019 23:06:42Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned on Tuesday that Turkey would not be able to withstand on its own another wave of refugees.

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“Building high walls with barbed wire is not the way to prevent illegal migration. … Keeping Syrian refugees within Turkey’s borders cannot be the only way of solving the problem of migration,” Erdogan said at a conference of countries participating in the Budapest Process, a forum established to find common solutions to the refugee problem.

Erdogan’s words were meant mainly for the ears of European Union countries that are signatories to an agreement with Turkey on refugees, but which are still refusing to grant Turkish citizens visa exemptions, one of the key components of the agreement.

Threatening to allow Syrian refugees to continue into Europe is not new, arising every time Turkey discusses implementing its agreement with the European Union. The threat is meant to pressure the EU to grant the visa exemptions, but Erdogan’s words are also addressed to Russia and Iran, who continue to push for military action in Idlib province, where tens of thousands of militia rebels are concentrated, including radical Islamists.

According to understandings reached by Turkey and Russia, military action was postponed to allow Turkey to try and persuade the radical militias to leave the area peacefully, but so far Turkey has not managed to change the situation on the ground.

The Idlib province is the last significant holdout that is keeping the Syrian army from controlling the entire country, thus also constituting a stumbling block for reaching any diplomatic solution. Turkey is rightly concerned that fighting in Idlib will create a new and big wave of refugees that will cross into Turkey, as well as leading to another large-scale massacre.

Erdogan has been proposing for some time now that a security zone be established in northern Syria, controlled and monitored by Turkey and serving as a temporary refuge for refugees now living in Turkey. Russia and the U.S. agree in principle to establishing such a zone but the U.S. objects to Turkey having sole responsibility, out of concern that its forces will take action against Kurdish forces that are still considered to be U.S. allies.

Efforts are being made to find a formula for establishing a multinational monitoring force in northern Syrian provinces bordering Turkey, but Turkey is resisting this since it wants a free hand in fighting what it defines as Kurdish terrorist militias. It seems that in the absence of an agreement that is acceptable to the U.S. and Turkey, the U.S. will find it difficult to adhere to the schedule set by President Trump for the withdrawal of American forces from Syria.

According to Erdogan, Turkey has already invested $37 billion of its resources in absorbing and keeping more than 3 million refugees, but the economic aspects of the refugee problem are secondary to its desire to set up the security zone against Kurdish militias. Possible modes of action that will allow a squaring of the circle, with Turkey safeguarding its southern border and solving the Idlib province problem while preventing large scale military action, were discussed by Turkey, Russia and Iran in Sochi on February 14, on the same day a U.S.-initiated conference was held in Warsaw, aimed at coordinating action against Iran.

According to reports from Sochi, the three countries are planning joint action to clear Idlib of radical Islamist groups, but the means for achieving this or a timetable for military operations were not specified. Coordinating military action with Iran and Russia deepens the rift between Turkey, a member of NATO, and the U.S., which is occupied mainly with finding tactical solutions which would enable a peaceful withdrawal from Syria, with no diplomatic or strategic plan and without defining its future strategic interests there.

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1.6957275Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:29:45Adi Dovrat-Meseritz וRonny Linder-GanzWed, 20 Feb 2019 22:39:06The Gur sect, the largest in the Hasidic world, is the midst of a huge fundraising venture and is asking Israel’s biggest companies to contribute. But despite the sect’s economic might, a survey by TheMarker found that none have so far agreed to pitch in, although three say they have yet to decide.

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The Gur Hasidim are seeking to raise 100 million shekels ($27.7 million) in the campaign, which will open with an event at an arena in Jerusalem being billed as “The Biggest Mass Rally Ever of the Haredi Public.” Not only will a large number of a Hasidim be attending but the rebbe himself, Yaakov Aryeh Alter, will be making a rare public appearance. For each outside contribution, the sect is promising that its followers will match it one for one.

Rallies like the Gur are staking are common in the Haredi world as a way of raising funds for their educational and other institutions. The Haredi news website Kikar Shabbat two years ago quoted Nahman Vidislavski, the administrative director of the Gur’s institutions, that the sect raised $50 million a year.

Sponsorship deals with big companies are a big part of the process. Although the Haredi community is poor, it accounts for between 8 percent and 10 percent of Israel’s population and its buying power is considerable.

Yaakov Litzman, the deputy health minister and effective head of the ministry, wields enormous power over the healthcare system and has led crusades against unhealthy eating that affect sales and costs for Israel’s food industry.

A promotional brochure for the sponsorship deals, which was obtained by TheMarker, touts the sect’s power. “The Gur community is the largest Hasidic power in the world. Among its followers are hundreds of key figures in the business world, politics and the rabbinical world. It’s no wonder that the Gur community has a strategic influence in all areas of Israeli society,” it boasts.

Nevertheless, a survey of potential sponsors for the rally queried by TheMarker found there was little interest in sponsorships. Among the four health maintenance organizations, one (Clalit) denied it had been approached for a sponsorship and the other three (Maccabee, Meuhedit and Leumit) said they had declined.

Israelis big banks – Leumi, Hapoalim, Mizrahi Tefahot and Union – as well as the country’s biggest food makers – Tnuva, Strauss, Osem, Unilever Israel and Central Bottling – said they would not be sponsoring the rally.

None said they would pay for a sponsorship, but three – the supermarket chain Shufersal, Mercantile Bank and the soft drink company Tempo – said they were still deciding.

Those who have turned down a sponsorship said the reason was the high price the Gur organizers were asking, which is for deals of 250,000 or 150,000 shekels.

For their part, the organizers said they are optimistic and said sponsors had been lined up – but declined to reveal who they were.

A reporter for TheMarker, who approached the official organizer posing as a representative for an unnamed overseas food company, tried to learn the name but only got hints. “I don’t like to be quoted but there are banks, HMOs and several food companies.” In a later call the organizer admitted he hadn’t succeeded in getting sponsors and the job had been given to someone else.

A call to his replacement, this time conducted as a reporter for TheMarker, revealed that some of the companies that had said they were not taking a sponsorship had, in fact, done so. Bbut the organizer said the sponsorship drive was just getting stated. “We working on it. We only decded three weeks ago there would be an event and began the work.”

Companies are being offered a “Gold” sponsorship for 250,000 shekels, which entitles them to be officially recognized at the rally, screen promotional videos on giant screens and distribute gifts. Only four companies can be designated Gold. Others can take the 150,000-shekel Silver option, which offers fewer benefits.

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1.6957035Thu, 21 Feb 2019 05:07:49Limor Livnat Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:04:04What do we see on the shelves of the political supermarket just as the party slates for the Knesset election are about to be finalized? On one side, there are the clearly right-wing parties grouped around a good Likud team, with the Bennett-Shaked Hayamin Hehadash party to its right, along perhaps with a Kahanist party and Yisrael Beiteinu and Kulanu, on the hope that they garner the minimum four Knesset seats.

And on the other side? Neither right nor left, as Benny Gantz, the leader of Hosen L’Yisrael, put it. Nothing definable. Same goes for Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Labor and Orli Levi-Abekasis. Welcome to the age of vagueness.

Gantz delivered a maiden speech from two teleprompters, after endless drafts and rehearsals, in which he managed to say everything and nothing. He also couldn’t give clear answers to most of the questions that Shlomo Artzi and Hanoch Daum put to him in a Yedioth Ahronoth interview, and when it comes to the one substantial comment he made — on the 2005 disengagement from Gaza — he felt compelled to issue a “clarification,” lest he, heaven forbid, be labeled a leftist.

On Tuesday he presented his party’s Knesset slate. Just how is Moshe Ya’alon, who has said there is room for another million settlers in the West Bank, to live under the same roof as Gantz, who supports another disengagement (with or without a clarification)? Or Zvi Hauser, a forefather of the nation-state law, and Alon Schuster, the former head of the Sha’ar Hanegev Regional Council, who said: “I would be willing to hand my regional council over to Hamas in return for peace”? And how will settler Yoaz Hendel get along with Michael Biton, who told a J Street conference that “the settlements are an obstacle to peace and Israel will eventually have to evacuate tens or hundreds of thousands of settlers”?

And what are the positions of Orit Farkash-Hacohen, who headed the Electricity Authority but has yet to illuminate us in the slightest on her views? Same goes for Miki Haimovich. Yes, we all know the television anchor is a vegetarian, but how about a little information about her views beyond her public profile? And the refugees from October’s municipal elections? What contribution have they made aside from losing their mayoral races and abandoning their voters for a party that’s like a general store?!

When it comes to the head of the Histadrut labor federation, Avi Nissenkorn, we actually know just about everything. He’s definitely left-wing! Socially minded hard left!

And what about Levi-Abekasis? A hard-working Knesset member, a socially minded left-wing voice who has brought Prof. Yifat Shasha-Biton on board with her. Biton is left-wing. The most left-wing. Not just social left. She was a member of the board of the New Israel Fund and Women Lawyers for Social Justice and also asked the attorney general to look into whether the Israeli army broke the law in its treatment of Palestinian women during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

How will all of these people get along with someone like David Permutter, who had been the highest-ranking Israeli at Intel and who has an estimated net worth of 100 million shekels? It’s quite the mix. The vagueness on Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid slate is about the same, but there is also nearly total discipline in the party. Everyone obeys. Otherwise they would be out, which is why people like Ofer Shelah and Yael German, who are clearly left-wing, held their tongues in the outgoing Knesset when Lapid suddenly veered sharply to the right. Still, the public has no way of knowing where Lapid currently stands. Is his wife, Lihi, still performing the religious ritual of separating challah?

And congratulations to Yesh Atid, really, on landing the first female army general, Orna Barbivai, but we’d also like to know a little about where she stands — on diplomatic issues, security issues, anything. Or maybe it doesn’t really matter, since everyone there toes the left-right line, whatever it happens to be.

In presenting his party’s slate, Lapid said: “We wanted answers from Gantz but haven’t received them,” accusing Gantz of ambiguity on values and ideology. He’s absolutely right. But it’s just as true about Lapid and the whole nothing of a center. There’s no there there.

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1.6957034Thu, 21 Feb 2019 04:07:41Gideon LevyWed, 20 Feb 2019 20:03:58The Mother Teresa of peace has gone and left us. “She paid the price of peace,” said the Haaretz editorial two days ago, similar to what was written after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. “The hopes that you ignited will vanquish the despair,” her rival Ehud Barak waxed poetic, and even her hangman, Avi Gabbay, lamented the loss. There are good things to be said about Tzipi Livni, but her contribution to peace is not one of them. Not only did she not contribute anything, she caused fateful damage to the cause. Livni gave peace a bad name. Her peace was a racist, nationalist, cold, disgusting peace. It’s no wonder no one wanted it.

She didn’t even mean peace, she just wanted “an accord.” The accord she aspired to was based upon one thing: a Jewish state. Jewish and democratic, with priority for the former. When this is the motivation and the language, you can’t build peace. You can only evoke a negative reaction to it. Preaching peace out of revulsion for the other people, out of a desire to be rid of them – “the demographic problem”’ – cannot lead to peace with them. When the vision is “divorce between porcupines,” as she once put it, there is no way to breathe new life and hope into it. And without a new spirit, without a new chapter in the relationship, there can be no peace.

>> A champion of alliances in Israeli politics, Tzipi Livni rejected at finish line | Analysis

The accord she aspired to was born out of her aversion to the Palestinians. Like all the Zionist left, she just wanted them out of her sight. Separation. Us over here, them over there. No peace was ever made this way. Nelson Mandela didn’t speak this way about the whites in South Africa; Menachem Begin didn’t speak this way about Egypt. Begin showed respect for the Egyptians. Livni shows just the opposite for the Palestinians, like most Israelis. Even World War II ended with more hopeful words than those of the supposed Israeli peacemaker whom everyone is embracing now.

Only in the upside-down world of Israeli politics could she be called a leftist. Livni was and remains profoundly on the nationalist right. She wanted an ethnically pure nation-state and made any accord conditional upon the Palestinians recognizing Israel’s Jewishness. Not something that was demanded of Egypt and Jordan. She spoke about the Palestinians with typical Israeli condescension – never seeing them as having equal rights in this land, even after hundreds of hours of negotiations with them. “The Palestinians have to understand,” she often preached to them in interviews, as if she were their teacher. But she never “had to understand” their side. That didn’t count to her. Livni didn’t “have to understand” that their land was stolen from them in 1948, and that the policy of theft and humiliation and violence and occupation hasn’t stopped since then.

And security was only a matter for Jews, too, of course. Livni never understood that Israel bears a heavy moral responsibility, that without taking responsibility for its crimes and making amends for them, no peace will can ever be made, even after a thousand rounds of negotiations. All she wanted was a Jewish state, and to hell with the Palestinians.

The crimes of the occupation never interested her. She was a senior partner in them. During one of the peaks, Operation Cast Lead, she served as foreign minister, acting as publicist for the unbridled Israeli violence. Nor was she interested in the Palestinians’ suffering. Just give her a Jewish state and everything will be fine.

To her credit, though, at least she was one of the few who understood there was a problem and didn’t ignore it. To her credit, she did her utmost to bring about a solution.

Being the last one to seek a solution, amid a chorus of suppression and denial, is no small thing. Which is why I have written in praise of her at times. But she became the queen of the process. Just give her some negotiations, even if they lead nowhere, even if they cannot possibly lead anywhere. For her, negotiations were the goal. And they were useless. She was in favor of the two-state solution, with a united Jerusalem and most of the settlements and no right of return, not even a single refugee, as she once said, boasting of being “the most extreme on the refugee issue.” A warrior for peace? What a joke.

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1.6957320Thu, 21 Feb 2019 03:50:47Zehava GalonWed, 20 Feb 2019 23:24:02Elly Sapper, Nicole Meyer and Dassi Erlich are three sisters who attended an ultra-Orthodox school in Melbourne, Australia and are now accusing the school’s principal, Malka Leifer, of rape and sexual abuse. At first, they said, they didn’t know what was happening. They were only little girls and no one had taught them about sex, certainly not about rape.

Leifer, who has been charged with 74 counts of rape and abuse, fled Australia. She is now in Israel, protected by Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman. He is suspected of threatening psychiatrists in Israel in an attempt to have them submit professional opinions that would prevent Leifer from being extradited.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping silent. Leifer is not newscaster Oshrat Kotler, and, for the prime minister, abetting pedophiles is not as serious as expressing shock at the behavior of soldiers in the West Bank, as Kotler did.

You don’t even need the pretext of defending a pedophile to demand that Litzman get the boot. He’s had the health portfolio since 2009, and it would be hard to know how many people paid with their lives for this lost decade. For years, the health system in Israel has been on the brink of collapse. Doctors recount impossible stress and patients released too early to make room for others and describe huge shortfalls in manpower.

Litzman’s response to all of this is: “People are simply living longer.” The Health Ministry’s rebuttal was a shocking survey that indicated that 69 percent of people who were placed in corridors during their hospitalization were satisfied with conditions at the hospital and 65 percent said they felt “strengthened.”

Litzman has actually had some amazing achievements to his credit. He managed to clear out three rooms for the Gur rebbe and his entourage at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital in Ein Karem, telling anyone questioning it that it was none of their business. He also visited Rabbi Eliezer Berland, who was under house arrest following a conviction of sexual misconduct with minors. Litzman signed a commitment for a 200,000 shekel ($55,000) bond for a woman suspected of starving her three-year-old son to a point at which he weighed only 7 kilos (15 pounds). In a patent case of a conflict of interest, Litzman ordered the convening of a committee to look into the conduct of the hospital that reported the child abuse.

It’s unclear why Litzman bothers helping people suspected of pedophilia or child abuse. His job makes him responsible for human life, yet he has used his office in defense of abomination and to turn the public health system into the Gur rebbe’s private court.

The Hamodia daily, which has ties to Litzman, has recently had the benefit of regular advertising from the country’s health maintenance organizations, which have also sponsored conferences organized by the newspaper. When corruption is so out in the open while the entire political system says nothing, everyone knows what line to toe.

Another prime minister could have demanded that Litzman resign. That would not have led to a breakup of the coalition, but Benjamin Netanyahu cannot demand something of his coalition partners that he refuses to demand of himself. That’s why the health system will continue to be trodden upon by this cynical man. If your parents have to stay in a hospital corridor, that’s your problem.

I’ve heard several people on the right wing explain that Netanyahu is a good prime minister and that they’re ready to live with his corruption, but anyone willing to live with a corrupt prime minister will ultimately have to live with the corruption of his coalition partners. That’s the nature of their alliance — one scoundrel defending another. And these are just the ones the public is aware of.

Litzman is suspected of threatening psychiatrists to protect a pedophile. One can only imagine what it’s like for a psychiatrist to weigh his or her career against helping a pedophile, and imagine what they’re thinking now, a week after the news broke, when the person who threatened them is still in office.

One can imagine the real price the public is paying for the Netanyahu’s government’s continued rule.

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1.6957376Thu, 21 Feb 2019 03:36:05Haaretz EditorialThu, 21 Feb 2019 03:35:48Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s lust for power knows no limits. The pressure he brought to bear on Habayit Hayehudi and National Union – including a promise of the housing and education ministries, two seats in the security cabinet and a reserved spot on the Likud list for one of their members – bore fruit. Rabbi Rafi Peretz responded to Netanyahu’s call to unite with the Otzma Yehudit party, comprised of followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, which will receive slots No. 5 and No. 8 on the joint ticket.

Thus, under the sponsorship of a prime minister who is prepared to sacrifice every principle and smash every institution in his battle to entrench his regime, the followers of Kahane will return to the Knesset riding like the Messiah on the donkey of religious Zionism.

>> Courting Kahanists, Netanyahu takes politics to the gutter | Analysis ■ The Kahanists and the homophobes: The two parties no one wants but Netanyahu needs

Kahane’s Kach party, which championed the deportation of the Arabs from all of “Eretz Israel,” was disqualified from contending for Knesset in 1988 because its platform contained racist incitement. It held a Knesset seat from 1984 until 1988. After the massacre by Baruch Goldstein, a Kach activist, at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, the government declared the Kach and Kahane Chai movements illegal terror organizations. Kach is also on the American and EU lists of terror groups. But none of this matters to Netanyahu, who is determined to win at any price.

Otzma Yehudit is the political home of Kahane’s students and admirers, extreme Arab-haters who believe in Jewish supremacy, among them the founder of the Lehava movement, the radical-right group that opposes personal relationships between Jews and non-Jews. The Kahanists followed the “advice” of the party’s rabbis – Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu and Rabbi Yehuda Kroizer – who told them to accept the compromise because the fate of the Land of Israel is at stake.

This was an extreme move for Habayit Hayehudi as well. Senior party members, among them MK Moti Yogev, exerted great pressure on Peretz to block the union. Journalist Yifat Ehrlich, who is No. 3 on Habayit Hayehudi’s slate, said most of the party opposed the union and that the party’s central committee wouldn’t approve it. The fact that even National Union head Bezalel Smotrich, a racist nationalist, opposed the link demonstrates how bad the Kahanists are.

It’s ironic that the party that considers itself a bastion of morality has turned itself into the door through which despicable racists and violent nationalists will enter the Knesset. All the talk about the need to create a “technical bloc” to “prevent the loss of seats on the right” cannot blur the “moral” choice made by religious Zionism, Netanyahu and the right-wing bloc.

This is chilling proof of the direction the right is taking, led by Netanyahu. Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg announced that if Habayit Hayehudi submits a slate with Otzma Yehudit candidates on it, her party will petition the Central Elections Committee to disqualify it. Otzma Yehudit should not be allowed to run.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

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1.6957211Thu, 21 Feb 2019 03:18:44Almog Ben ZikriWed, 20 Feb 2019 21:36:28The four-year-old who is suspected of being murdered by his mother nine days ago in Eilat has still not been buried. The Justice Ministry’s director-general Emmy Palmor and State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan intervened on Tuesday to find a solution to a problem, which arose because the mother has been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward since the murder and is incapable of deciding on a burial. President Reuven Rivlin’s office also said it would intervene so that the child could be buried forthwith.

The boy’s body has been at the National Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir since his death, since no legal guardian is available for dealing with the burial. A legal affairs source told Haaretz that the boy’s mother is in no shape to sign a consent form for burial, and one of the solutions being examined is that the Custodian General sign the required form.

>> 26 years later, DNA used to arrest suspect in murder of Israeli woman

A Ukrainian man is claiming that he is the boy’s biological father and that he wishes to take the boy to his country for burial. Another source says that when the man was located a few days ago, he had no documentation showing that he was the boy’s father. One possibility being looked into is that the man be allowed to prove his paternity, thus allowing him to decide about the burial.

Haaretz did not get a response to questions it addressed to police and the State Prosecutor’s Office. On Tuesday the State Prosecutor’s Office said there were no new developments. The Justice Ministry started dealing with the issue on Tuesday, trying to resolve the legal problem, with the mother’s lawyers talking to the Southern District’s state prosecutor for civil affairs, attorney Zion Illouz.

The mother was arrested last week, suspected of drowning the boy in the bathtub at their home. Reportedly, her partner, who is not the boy’s biological father, screamed, “You’ve killed the boy!” The mother, who arrived from Ukraine 10 months ago, has been at a mental health facility in Be’er Sheva since her arrest. She was found this week to be unfit to stand trial and not responsible for her actions during the murder, based on a psychiatric assessment.

State prosecutors will have to decide whether to file an indictment and contest the psychiatric evaluation, or accept it and demand an injunction calling for her hospitalization for the maximal period stipulated by law – 25 years.

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1.6957316Thu, 21 Feb 2019 03:04:26Yossi VerterWed, 20 Feb 2019 23:21:13Twenty-five hours before the Knesset gates close to all party representatives, a deal was concluded, certain to go down in the annals of infamy in Israeli politics. The disciple-thugs of Rabbi Meir Kahane, disseminators of hatred, racism and persecution of minorities, carrying the torch of homophobia and racial purity, won an entrance ticket into Israel’s legislature.

The hands approving this disgrace belong to the central committee of Habayit Hayehudi, heir to the once-moderate National Religious Party. However, the instigator of this turn of events is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, as always, proves that there is no level to which he will not sink, no value too sacred to trash, a person with no morality or accountability when it comes to his political survival – in this case his personal well-being, too.

Netanyahu was careful not to taint his own hands with the slime known as “Otzma Yehudit.” He was careful enough to contact Kahane followers Ben-Ari, Ben-Gvir, Marzel and Gopstein using mediators. These were the leaders of Habayit Hayehudi, Rafi Peretz and MK Bezalel Smotrich. They were his emissaries in perpetrating this transgression.

>> The Kahanists and the homophobes: The two parties no one wants but Netanyahu needs ■ Why racist rabbi Meir Kahane is still roiling Israeli politics 30 years after his death ■ In Likud heartland, these Israelis are ready to turn their backs on Netanyahu

The turnaround of Rafi Peretz is no less astounding. Two weeks ago he expressed reservations about Smotrich. On Wednesday he gave an impassioned speech, with the characteristic upward-rolling of the eyes, in favor of Ben-Gvir. The path from educator to politician was never so short and successful.

It’s not that there’s a big difference between the Kahanists and Smotrich – the latter is just more refined, sophisticated and affable than they are. However, their basic views are the same. This person became a welcome guest at the Prime Minister’s Office on Wednesday. His father and mentor became the prime minister’s interlocutors, and the wooing knew no bounds.

The English say that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the making. In this test, Netanyahu scores top marks. The right, in all its hues, will arrive at the April 9 election in full formation. The number of votes it could potentially lose is now negligible. Uniting in a “technical bloc” – the decade’s biggest euphemism – almost guarantees that the Likud-rightist-Haredi bloc will vanquish the opposing bloc and decide the identity of the person forming the next government.

The media reported that Netanyahu was required to pay a “heavy price” to the extreme right to gain ratification of the merger. Don’t make us laugh. He didn’t bat an eyelid when promising to give Peretz and Smotrich two important portfolios in the next coalition. He didn’t blink or blush while promising a representative of Habayit Hayehudi, most likely Eli Ben-Dahan, the No. 28 spot on the Likud list, as compensation for being bumped after Habayit Hayehudi merged with Otzma Yehudit. After the election, Ben-Dahan can return to his natural home. It not only stinks, it may be illegal.

What does Netanyahu care? He has no problem bringing politics down to the level of prostitution. Who is there to oppose him? Likud members are silent, shamefully, and the minister of justice, with chilling composure, welcomed the union.

It was not just ensuring the size of the rightist bloc that led Netanyahu to cancel his anticipated meeting with Putin, one he’s been begging to hold for months. His personal fate played a role too. He will need a rigid right-wing coalition to pass the “French” law in its Israeli version, a law preventing the indictment of a sitting prime minister. He can definitely count on Ben-Ari and Ben-Gvir.

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1.6957209Thu, 21 Feb 2019 02:27:54Jack KhouryWed, 20 Feb 2019 21:36:08Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lashed out at Israel on Wednesday for its decision to deduct 500 million shekels ($138.2 million) from taxes that would otherwise be transferred to the PA. Israel announced the deduction to offset an equivalent sum paid by the Palestinian Authority to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons and to their families and released prisoners.

The Palestinians would not accept any money from Israel if any sum at all is deducted, Abbas said.

“On behalf of the Palestinian people and leadership, we condemn and reject the arbitrary Israeli decision, and stress that we will not accept the money if even a cent is missing,” Abbas told a Palestinian leadership meeting in Ramallah. “Either we get all our money and rights, or we won’t get anything. If they deduct some of it, they can deduct all of it.”

Abbas declared Israel’s decision “an act of theft and plunder,” adding that it was aimed at pressuring the PA to accept U.S. President Donald Trump’s forthcoming Middle East peace plan. Referring to the agreement regulating economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Abbas called the withholding of the funds "a nail in the coffin of the Paris Protocol, and Israel’s renunciation of all the agreements it has signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

Abbas said Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian dead are his top priority. He promised that the PA would pay "any amount of money that is raised so everyone understands that they are the most respected and appreciated part of the Palestinian people.”

On Sunday, the Israeli security cabinet passed a resolution suspending payment of the 500 million shekels, funds deducted from the hundreds of millions of shekels that Israel transfers each month to the Palestinian Authority in taxes that it collects on behalf of the PA.

Abbas' office issued a statement in response saying: “We strongly condemn any cut to the Palestinians’ money. It is the Palestinian people’s money.” Abbas spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, added: “The Palestinian leadership will not agree to any harm to the heroic prisoners and the families of the dead and wounded. We view Israel’s decision as a unilateral move that harms the signed agreements between Israel and the PA, and in this context, the Paris economic protocol as well.”

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1.6955720Thu, 21 Feb 2019 01:05:25Danielle ZiriThu, 21 Feb 2019 01:05:23NEW YORK – Mendel was on the phone outside his Crown Heights yeshiva dorm, talking to his family back in Australia, when he suddenly felt a blow to the head. It was so strong it knocked him to the floor and sent his glasses and yarmulke flying.

Mendel, who asked that his last name not be published, says he got up and unsuccessfully chased one of his assailants, with the police arriving soon after. He hopped into a patrol vehicle in an attempt to track down the aggressors, who hadn’t even tried to steal anything from him.

“We’ve all been hearing about these things,” Mendel tells Haaretz, “it’s been going on for decades. But for it to happen to you – that definitely came as a shock.” It's a reality no one wants to accept until it happens to them, he adds, several weeks after the incident took place overnight on January 30.

Attacks on the rise

Reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States – ranging from violent attacks to verbal abuse and vandalism (including swastikas drawn on Jewish institutions) – have been on the rise over the past two years, culminating in the deadliest U.S. attack on the Jewish community ever with the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last October.

The trend hasn’t spared New York City. In 2018, the local police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force recorded a 23 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents citywide – 189, compared to 154 in 2017. And while most of the incidents last year were criminal mischief offenses (which include graffiti and cemetery desecration), the number of assaults has jumped 267 percent – from three in 2017 to 11 in 2018. Aggravated harassment, which includes drawing swastikas on buildings, has risen 73 percent, from 41 to 71 incidents.

Task force figures also show that most of the reported anti-Semitism incidents in New York last year took place within the 71st Precinct, which covers the neighborhood of Crown Heights; the 66th Precinct (covering Borough Park), and the 24th Precinct (which includes the Upper West Side). All three neighborhoods are home to large, visibly Jewish populations.

And there are no signs of that upward trend abating in 2019: In the first six weeks of the year, a total of 32 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in New York, compared to 17 during the same period in 2018 – an 88 percent increase. Among those incidents, 16 fall under different levels of aggravated harassment – a significant increase from the five such incidents in the same period last year. No incidents that can be legally defined as assaults have been recorded so far.

“There have always been incidents, but never clustered like this,” Yaacov Behrman, a Jewish community activist in Crown Heights, tells Haaretz. “There is no question whatsoever that incidents are on the rise.”

Defining a crime

Although the police statistics illustrate a general trend, Behrman says they are limited in scope and may not actually reflect the full extent of attacks on the street.

“If I go and beat up a person, and you can’t prove I was targeting the person for hate, it’s [just] considered a violent offense,” he explains, adding: “If there’s a robbery involved, it’s possible it would be considered a robbery and not a hate crime.

“There was a guy running up and down Kingston Avenue shoving and punching people,” Behrman continues, referring to an incident in mid-January. “They arrested him and he said ‘When I get drunk, I hit people.’ [But] every time he gets drunk, he hits a Jew. He’s probably not going to be charged with a hate crime, because they can’t prove to a grand jury that his intent was” to target Jews, he adds.

Motty Katz lives in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Borough Park and for some 25 years has been part of his local Shomrim (the neighborhood watch group in Jewish communities). He agrees that not all cases of anti-Semitism are being reported to the NYPD.

“From time to time, we have guys who will curse anti-Semitic comments at people and run away – and people don’t report that because the guy ran away,” he says. “I tell everybody to call 911, because [the police] should know if it’s happening or not. If they don’t make reports, the NYPD wouldn’t know about it.”

He calls his group “the eyes and ears for the NYPD. That means when we see something, we have to say something.”

Katz says it is common for community members to call Shomrim before or while they are dialing 911. People “have trust in the NYPD, but they feel comfortable with us and we’ll have a faster response time,” he explains.

However, some in the Orthodox community believe the statistics showing the rise in anti-Semitism don’t reflect an increase in incidents but rather, increased sensitivity to such incidents.

Borough Park native Alexander Rapaport, who runs the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network in Brooklyn and Queens, says he can’t even remember the number of times he has been verbally abused, or worse.

“Do you remember that video of a woman walking down the street for 10 hours and getting catcalled?” he asks. “If I walked with my beard and with my peot [sidelocks], I would get more harassment walking on the same streets she walked,” he tells Haaretz.

“I have been spat at in Times Square, I have been yelled at by drunken people on the Coney Island beach – it’s nothing new,” he says. “The only difference is that now [the authorities] are willing to listen.”

Generating fear

Two of Mendel’s attackers were arrested on the day of the incident and the third within 24 hours. The men were African-Americans aged 18, 20 and 21.

Mendel later found out he wasn’t their only victim that night: A 51-year-old Hasidic man had also been pushed and beaten even more violently. That attack was caught on surveillance cameras and released to the local media.

He says he has no idea why he didn’t suffer the same level of violence. “Thank God they didn’t, but they could have. It might be because I screamed really loud. It might have scared them off,” he says.

Stories such as Mendel’s are an obvious cause for concern among this insular religious community. Last October, Borough Park was the scene of a violent assault when a Hasidic man in his 60s was beaten to the ground in broad daylight. “That really shook up the community, they were scared,” recounts Katz. “Anybody could be walking on the street and get hurt.”

People are “obviously nervous and frightened by what's going on,” Behrman adds. “Even small instances where people were pushed – that generates fear.”

Mendel admits to still being shaken by the January 30 attack. “It has really taken away my sense of security,” he says. “I wouldn’t go in the street past midnight [now], I'm looking around the streets a lot more when I walk.”

Why now?

A question people inside and outside the Jewish community are increasingly asking is: why now? After the Jewish man was punched on Kingston Avenue in January, Behrman tweeted: “What's wrong with Crown Heights that innocents are being beaten in the streets? Is there an atmosphere that is encouraging violence?”

He believes the answer carries an economic dimension. “The prices in Crown Heights have gone up for apartments, rent, food,” says Behrman. “There is tremendous poverty; people can’t afford to live with the rising prices, and there is a story being peddled in the streets that the Jews are the ones doing this and raising the prices.

“If your landlord happens to be Jewish and he disrespects you, and you go and beat an innocent Jew, that is the very definition of anti-Semitism,” he says. “It doesn't make it right just because your landlord may have done something wrong. ... The truth of the matter is that gentrification is about economics, not race, and the Jewish community in Crown Heights has been here since 1940. We are suffering the same way everybody else is suffering.”

Evan Bernstein, the New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, says Brooklyn “has had issues of anti-Semitic assaults for some time. Whether it is gentrification or other issues that are leading to these assaults, the Jewish community ... is very concerned.”

In addition to gentrification, Behrman also points a finger at public figures who have either openly expressed anti-Semitic views or have refused to condemn them.

“Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman, tweeted that the Jews are buying up the government. That’s exactly like saying the Jews are buying up the community,” he charges. “That’s also not true and that’s very frightening.

“Anti-Semitism has become mainstream – from the halls of Congress to the leader of the opposition in Britain,” he adds, referring to Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Katz concurs that the current climate is being fueled by politicians’ failure to speak out against anti-Semitism. “Ten years ago, if a politician said [what Rep. Omar said about pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s control of Congress], they’d have to resign,” he says.

Since its last annual report, which showed an nearly 60 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States in 2017, ADL has attributed much of that rise to political rhetoric since the 2016 presidential campaign.

The 2017 neo-Nazi rally at Charlottesville, the Pittsburgh massacre “and elected officials’ statements have brought more attention to anti-Semitism nationally,” says Bernstein. “With that, more of a spotlight has been put on what is taking place in Brooklyn.”

Although Brooklyn-based incidents rarely make it past the local news, anti-Semitism has undoubtedly become big news in the United States since President Donald Trump took office.

“When there was a swastika on a bench in Ocean Parkway half a year before Trump was elected, you couldn't hold a press conference about it,” recounts Rapaport. “If you have a swastika in a park now, you’ll have every New York politician ready to stand in front of the camera.

“It’s good that it’s happening, but this was here before,” he continues. “So does that mean that if you change the president, we’ll stop talking about it?”

Rapaport, who describes himself as part of the “anti-Trump camp,” adds that while the “hate that [Trump] allows around him is terrible,” his administration can’t be held entirely responsible for manifestations of anti-Semitism.

“No one can tell me that it started with [Trump], because I felt it on my own skin,” Rapaport notes.

Condemning is not helping

Some Orthodox Jews say they feel excluded from the debate on anti-Semitism, and that the discussion surrounding it is more connected to politics than to them.

“If someone from any other minority is assaulted like that in the street, it makes national news,” says Mendel. “But when it happens to a Hasidic Jew, it doesn’t really get much further than the local papers and the Jewish papers. It’s as if people think, ‘Well, they look so Jewish they deserve it,’ or something.”

Adds Rapaport: “It’s fair to say that both sides [Republicans and Democrats] are using it a little bit for politics – and that’s the scary part. It loses its authenticity.”

Indeed, Rapaport admits to concerns about how he believes some lawmakers are jumping on every opportunity to condemn anti-Semitism and speak out against it. “Educating people to have less hate doesn’t come from politicians on a podium,” he says. “It’s a hard-to-deal-with problem, because condemning it is not really helping. It keeps it on the news, so to speak.”

In addition to his yeshiva studies, Mendel also volunteers once a week at a program providing religious instruction for Jewish children in New York City public schools.

The morning after he was attacked, his head still hurt and he didn’t feel like going to class. Although he says it would have been easy for him to cancel given the circumstances, he ultimately decided to proceed as usual and attend the class.

“I thought I should do it, and should feel more compelled to do it now than ever before because the youths who did this, they're only a few years younger than me,” he explains. “If they would have been taught good values by someone like myself 10 years ago – good morals in school instead of whatever they were doing – they wouldn't be in this place today.”

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1.6957235Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:55:18Amir Tibon וDanielle ZiriThu, 21 Feb 2019 00:55:21WASHINGTON, NEW YORK – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to make sure a racist, far-right party enters the next Knesset were condemned Wednesday by Jewish-American rabbis, organizations and donors who are usually supportive of Israel.

For weeks, Netanyahu has pushed for an election pact between Otzma Yehudit, an extremist party that includes supporters of the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, and the religious-Zionist Habayit Hayehudi party. On Wednesday, he convinced both parties to join forces and run on a joint ticket in the April 9 election, thus increasing their chances of passing the electoral threshold of 3.25 percent and winning seats in the Knesset.

Robert Wexler, a former Democratic member of Congress who was a strong supporter of Israel’s security needs during his time in Washington, told Haaretz hours before the unity pact was approved: “This will complicate efforts to advocate for Israel, especially within the Jewish community. What are we supposed to tell our children?”

Wexler added: “We, Zionists and supporters of Israel in America, spend so much effort to rightly expose and highlight incitement on the Palestinain side. So when the prime minister gives this legitimacy to such an extreme party, it hurts our efforts. I fear that it will introduce some degree of moral equivalence and serve to rationalize incitement. That’s not helpful.”

According to Wexler, “Likud is seen by many in the Jewish community today as representing the mainstream of Israeli politics. When this party takes, to some degree, responsibility for promoting a racist group, that makes it harder to defend Israel against unfair criticism. The main damage this will cause is going to be within the Jewish community.” Wexler added that he was particularly concerned because “this is part of a broader trend” that includes calls within the right-wing to annex the West Bank.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism – the largest Jewish organization in North America – told Haaretz, on his way to a work visit in Israel: “It’s deeply distressing to imagine that those who follow in the footsteps of Meir Kahane could be welcomed into Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political circle. Bolstering one’s political strength with the political party Otzma Yehudit, which professes racist views of Arabs, should be unthinkable.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro warned that if Otzma Yehudit's leaders are elected, that could create legal complications if they try to enter the United States. In the past, at least one of the party’s leaders was denied entry becasue of his affiliation with the Kach movement, which was designated as a terror organization by the Americans in the 1990s.

Susie Gelman, a major Jewish philanthropist who has supported Jewish and Israeli institutions for decades, told Haaretz: “As someone who has been involved for decades in Jewish organizational life, with a strong focus on supporting Israel, I find this absolutely shocking.”

Gelman chairs the Israel Policy Forum, which works to promote a two-state solution. She added, “I have had policy disagreements with Netanyahu before, but this raises a new question: Is there any line of decency and morality that he will not cross?”

According to Gelman, “Netanyahu’s actions are feeding the estrangement of young American Jews from Israel, but they are also having an impact on people of my generation – people who have supported Israel for their entire adult lives.” She clarified, however, that “I still feel committed to the Israeli people. I make a distinction between the Israeli government and the people of Israel.”

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt also weighed in on criticism of the political merger. “There should be no room for racism & no accommodation for intolerance in Israel or any democracy,” he tweeted. “ADL previously has spoken out on hate-filled rhetoric of leaders of the Otzma Yehudit party, it is troubling that they are being legitimized by this union,” he added.

An official in a group that promotes pro-Israel public diplomacy, who asked not to be named because the organization tends not to directly criticize the Israeli government, told Haaretz Netanyahu’s actions will be used by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. “When I saw the headlines, I immediately knew this thing will stay with us for months, and will reach college campuses and the Jewish community,” the official said.

Rabbi Josh Weinberg, vice president for Israel and Reform Zionism at the Union for Reform Judaism, also voiced concerns over the consequences. “It is simply reprehensible that PM Netanyahu would court Kahanist members of the far-right party Otzma Yehudit,” he said. “Their ideology of racism, sexism and extreme xenophobia should have no place in a Jewish and democratic state. Let us not forget that the Kach party was deemed illegal to run for the Knesset in the 1990s, and one need not look farther than their legislative agenda to understand why. Such extremism threatens the fabric of Israel’s democracy, the feeling of safety of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, and does great disservice to those of us who are dedicated to defending Israel’s image abroad.”

The progressive Zionist organization Ameinu said it was outraged by the move, calling it “a stain on Israel’s democracy and an affront to Zionism. There are certain ideas, policies and groups that are beyond the pale; Otzma Yehudit, a far-right, ultra-nationalist, racist party, has no place in the Knesset, much less in a potential government coalition. The mainstreaming of hate groups like Otzma Yehudit can only harm Israel’s standing in the international community and further damage the already delicate relations between Israeli and American Jews.”

The American Jewish Committee’s CEO, David Harris, told Haaretz: “It’s not our practice to comment on political parties and candidates in the midst of an Israeli election, just as we don’t, indeed are not permitted to, comment on political parties and candidates in the midst of an American election. As a general principle, though, we use any opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to the core values of Israel’s democratic and Jewish character, which we hope will be the ultimate winners in each election cycle.”

The American Jewish Congress declined to comment, saying it doesn’t comment on Israeli politics.

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1.6957293Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:35:22Jonathan Lis, Chaim Levinson, Lee Yaron וHaaretzWed, 20 Feb 2019 22:50:46With a Thursday deadline looming for the submission of party slates ahead of the April 9 Knesset election, Hosen L’Yisrael chairman Benny Gantz met on Wednesday with Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid in an attempt to reach an agreement to run on a joint ticket. The core of the differences between them has been Yesh Atid’s demand that there be a rotation for the prime minister’s post, between Gantz and Lapid, something to which Gantz objects.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was scheduled for Thursday, a move Likud sources attributed to the negotiations between Lapid and Gantz. A Kremlin spokesman was quoted by Russia's Sputnik news agency as saying that Netanyahu had asked for the meeting to be postponed for “domestic political reasons.”

Netanyahu and Putin had been expected to discuss the situation in Syria and strengthening security coordination between the countries’ militaries. A diplomatic source said they will speak by phone Thursday and set a new date for their meeting.

Meanwhile, Kulanu chairman Moshe Kahlon told a television interviewer that he wouldn’t rule out sitting in a government headed by Gantz. “When I know what Gantz’s agenda is, I will decide,” the outgoing finance minister said. “If Gantz presents a left-wing government or a government that endangers the State of Israel and divides Jerusalem, I won’t be there. If Gantz is not a left-winger but rather a member of the national camp and suited to my positions, I will sit with him in a government.”

On Tuesday, Gantz and Lapid spoke by phone and called publicly for the talks between the parties to be intensified. Gantz addressed the topic of a possible joint ticket Tuesday at an event at which he announced his party's own slate.

“Immediately after this conference is over, I will call my friend Yair Lapid and ask him to meet me tonight. I will ask him again to put every other consideration aside, and together to put Israel before everything. You don’t weaken the opportunity for historic change over arguments about work assignments.”

Lapid later responded to Gantz by saying: “As I said yesterday on stage [at a party rally], we will turn over every stone, we will do everything so as not to miss a historic opportunity to change the government.”

Levi-Abekasis blasts Gantz, will go it alone

Also Wednesday, Gesher party head Orly Levy-Abekasis announced that her party would run independently for Knesset and not join up with Benny Gantz’s Hosen L’Yisrael, as had been widely anticipated.

She maintained that Gantz did not uphold agreements that had been reached with him. “It was really disappointing to learn that the one who had heralded new and clean politics failed his first test – the credibility test,” she said.

“The idea of linking Gesher to Hosen L’Yisrael was raised by Mr. Gantz during our first meeting,” said Levi-Abekasis. She added the two had talked about major issues, “including the social welfare issue, which, as is known, is the ideological basis of the Gesher party. The Hosen L’Yisrael chairman expressed his agreement to make that issue one of the foundations on which our partnership would be built.”

Levi-Abekasis added that she and Gantz had set up a joint staff that held discussions on all the issues and came to agreements. “To our shock, since those agreements were put into signed documents, there began some strange agitation in Hosen L’Yisrael, accompanied by disinformation and tendentious media briefings, a type of hide-and-seek as though we hadn’t been talking, as if there were no agreements or understandings and no commitments, while the chairman, to my surprise, said nothing.

“It’s amazing how quickly new politicians have adopted old and rejected tricks that the public got sick of long ago,” she added. “It’s a shame that the man whom we hoped would run Israel was revealed to be a man who is controlled by others. A lack of experience led to this man actually coming to me today and asking me to give him time until he finishes his link-up with [Yesh Atid chairman Yair] Lapid. I have no other way to describe this behavior other than strange and weird.”

Green Leaf won't run ticket for first time in 20 years

After 20 years of Knesset campaigns that fell short of obtaining any legislative representation, the Green Leaf party, best known for advocating the legalization of marijuana, will not be running in the upcoming election, it announced on Wednesday.

“If we don’t run, then the 50,000 voters who are the minimal support the party has will go out to the ‘political voting market’ and the other parties will have to contend for their votes and support advancing the cause,” the party said.

Green Leaf first ran for Knesset in 1999 and got 34,000 votes. In 2003, 38,000 people voted for it, and in 2006 it got 40,000 votes. In 2009, the party split into two slates, one that ran under the name Green Leaf, which got 13,000 votes, and a second called Holocaust Survivors with Green Leaf Alumni, which got 2,300 votes. Some 43,000 people voted for the party in 2013, and in 2015 it got 47,000 votes.

“The move will create a political interest among the large parties to court our supporters and voters, which will help our objectives more than running for Knesset,” the party said. “Einstein said, ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ According to the latest polls, Green Leaf is still capable of easily getting one percent [voter] support today, and maybe even two percent if we were to decide to run. Nevertheless, we’ve decided to take this brave and correct step not to run in the 2019 election and to try something unexpected.”

Green Leaf chairman Oren Lebovitch added, “Green Leaf’s activists and voters have turned the cannibas plant from a humorous anecdote at best, or the madness of potheads at worst, into a plant that’s accessible to thousands of patients. Green Leaf instilled in both the public and parliament the policy of treatment and public diplomacy before criminal punishment and brought about social and medical justice. This success of the lengthy activism by the party and its members indeed inspired jealousy among other politicians and parties who adopted the agenda, both on the right and on the left.

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1.6957335Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:15:47JTA וCnaan LiphshizThu, 21 Feb 2019 00:03:02President Emmanuel Macron of France said he would have his country adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that mentions hatred of Israel to combat the rising tide of anti-Semitism in his country.

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“For the first time in many years, anti-Semitism is killing people again in France,” Macron said Wednesday night at the annual dinner of the CRIF umbrella of French Jewish groups. He added that French authorities “did not know how to react effectively,” calling this a “failure.”

Earlier this month, French authorities reported a 74 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 over the previous year.

Macron told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the decision on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition in a conversation Wednesday. Lawmakers in France have resisted the definition, which was adopted last year by the European Parliament and several European Union member states.

The move was announced one day after thousands of demonstrators, including two former French presidents, gathered in cities across France to condemn anti-Semitism. The rallies followed several incidents of anti-Semitism in France, including the desecration of a Jewish cemetery in the Strasbourg area.

In a statement about Macron’s move by Netanyahu’s office, a spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister said the definition in question “determines that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism.” The IHRA definition does not contain any reference to Zionism.

It does say that alongside the classic expressions, manifestations of anti-Semitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” though “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic.”

Pro-Palestinian activists have campaigned against the definition, claiming it silences criticism of Israel.

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1.6957271Wed, 20 Feb 2019 23:42:18Almog Ben ZikriWed, 20 Feb 2019 22:37:33Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman said that everything he may have allegedly done to prevent the extradition of a suspected pedophile to Australia “was for the public’s benefit, and in accordance with the law. I did exactly what I was supposed to do.”

His remarks, made at a ceremony for the opening of a new children’s wing at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, were all he would say about the police investigation into allegations that he pressured psychiatrists to declare Malka Leifer, the former principal of an ultra-Orthodox girls’ school in Melbourne, unfit to stand trial. Police say they have testimony from several psychiatrists about the pressure exerted on them, which included threats to remove them from their jobs if they didn’t cooperate.

Leifer, who fled to Israel in 2008, is charged with 74 counts of rape and sexual assault against three sisters who had been her students. Police said the psychiatrists were asked to submit a professional evaluation that Leifer was not fit to stand trial so she wouldn’t be extradited.

At least one psychiatrist, Dr. Kobi Charns, refused three times to sign an opinion saying the opposite – that she was pretending to be mentally ill to avoid prosecution.

The president of the Australasian Jewish Medical Federation in Victoria, Dr. Miriam Kuttner, wrote a letter of complaint about this to the ethics department of the Israel Medical Association.The Leifer case is not the first in which Litzman’s involvement in the area of mental health has raised questions.

In 2009, Channel 2 News reported that he had approached senior psychiatrists and asked them to issue more lenient evaluations of ultra-Orthodox sex offenders who were serving prison sentences.

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1.6956407Wed, 20 Feb 2019 22:05:06Ido EfratiWed, 20 Feb 2019 15:16:23The Health Ministry has agreed to let the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv charge foreign patients for treatment with an experimental drug not approved for use yet anywhere in the world, to treat arterial lateral sclerosis. The payment for use of the experimental therapy is supposed to fund the treatment of Israeli patients and also, treatment with the drug will not be part of the clinical trials it is undergoing.

The treatment is called NurOwn and is being developed by the Israeli firm BrainStorm. It is now undergoing Phase III clinical trials, which examine its medical efficacy. Normally drugs are not given to patients before their safety and efficacy are thoroughly tested, but the Health Ministry has approved limited use: eight Israeli ALS patients may have it, for free, and five patients from abroad may also receive it — but each will pay more than $300,000 for the treatment.

Last year, the Health Ministry had appointed an advisory committee to examine the issue. But the entire committee resigned in May before completing its task or submitting recommendations. Sources close to the issue said that a dispute developed between the committee members and the ministry over charging money for the experimental treatment. Ultimately approval was granted without the committee's input.

Phase 3 clinical trials for the therapy, NurOwn, which uses a patient’s own stem cells to treat ALS, are being done in the United States as of 2017, with 200 patients. Typically for clinical trials, half of the patients receive the treatment and half receive a placebo.

Last year BrainStorm announced that it would allow ALS patients in the U.S. to try the experimental therapy for $300,000 per patient, under the controversial right—to—try law the U.S. passed in May.

But the company backtracked after taking intense fire over that announcement. Regarding the present case, the company says the project is a not-for-profit humanitarian one. "The company’s previous trials included one-time injections of the cells and showed potential efficacy, which in some patients manifested itself in improved functioning. In light of the positive results we have moved to phase III with FDA approval, which is now underway, in which patients receive three injections of stem cells at intervals of two months. Since the trial is not in Israel, and following requests from many patients in Israel, BrainStorm agreed to try to make the treatment accessible outside of the trial to Israeli patients.”

According to the Health Ministry’s original approval, BrainStorm said, the treatment was to have been given to 10 patients for a fee, two of whom were to be foreigners and eight Israelis. “Because BrainStorm wants to make the treatment accessible to Israelis at no cost, and such a program requires funding, we asked for approval to treat eight Israeli patients for free and five wealthy foreigners who would be charged a fee that would also cover the treatment for the Israelis. To the best of our knowledge, such approval in principle has been given and we are still waiting for final approval. BrainStorm is a public company that operates and will always operate only within the law, in accordance with the required ethical rules.”

It was in February a year ago that the Health Ministry empaneled the committee to discuss allowing use of a treatment still undergoing clinical trials. The committee included senior doctors and legal experts but no ethics expert. Sourasky made its request while the committee was still deliberating but the disagreements that developed led the committee to disband, leaving no minutes of its meetings, let alone recommendations.

According to a source involved in the process, the discord between the committee and the ministry revolved around the number of patients to be eligible for the treatment. Sourasky and BrainStorm sought approval for 20 patients – 10 Israelis to be treated for free and 10 foreigners who would pay (to fund the treatment for the Israelis). The sources said the committee thought eight Israelis and two foreigners should be treated. Sourasky and BrainStorm then suggested a compromise – eight Israelis treated for free, and five paying foreigners, which the committee rejected, but the Health Ministry accepted. That was the reason the committee members resigned, according to the source.

A month later the Health Ministry gave Sourasky approval in principle to begin the experimental therapy on eight Israelis and five foreigners, and charge the foreign patients for it.

So far the drug has undergone Phase II testing, completed in mid—2016, for safety and efficacy in 48 subjects, 36 of whom received the treatment and the rest, as a control group, received a placebo. At the end of the study, BrainStorm reported that 40 percent of the patients showed a 50 percent improvement 12 weeks after the stem cells had been injected.

The technology is based on research by Tel Aviv University professors Daniel Offen and Eldad Melamed and uses stem cells harvested from the patient’s own bone marrow (autologous transfer). The cells are isolated, propagated in the lab and appropriate ones are injected back into the patient and excrete large quantities of proteins, which are responsible for the growth and survival of nerve cells and their interaction between nerves and muscles. The treatment aims to slow the degeneration of brain tissue.

Some European nations enable drugs that haven't been approved for general use, under special circumstances, and since last year, the U.S. has followed suit with the right—to—try law. President Donald Trump signed a law allowing terminally ill patients who have exhausted all known medical options to avail themselves of unapproved treatments if these treatments have passed their first phase of clinical trials. The law sparked controversy and many ethical questions, which arose because the companies developing the drugs are allowed to select the patients to be treated, and since no restrictions have been placed on how much they can charge.

Since September 2016, use approved by the Health Ministry of drugs not fully tested yet has been legal in Israel as well.

But selling these last—ditch therapies enables wealthy patients to ensure they get the drug without participating in medical trials that could risk winding up with placebo, an expert in stem cell therapy told Haaretz. “We fear that this route will become the preferred route of the companies and will become a parallel and less strict road to marketing drugs and therapies."

Another source said charging patients for such treatment was cynical exploitation of anxious sick people and their families.

The Health Ministry stated that Sourasky has not yet received the final word on the project , but remains is conditional on the hospital completing procedures. It agrees that the hospital proceed with the said limited number of patients and pointed out that the law does not prohibit charging patients for such treatment. The ministry added that its approval didn't require the okay from the defunct advisory committee in any case, only the hospital’s Helsinki Committee (which reviews proposals for clinical human trials), and that approval had been obtained.

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1.6957105Wed, 20 Feb 2019 21:18:33Aya Chajut Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:31:40On Wednesday, France threatened to boycott the Eurovision song contest due to a television series to be aired in May on Israel's public broadcaster.

The three-part miniseries, called "Douze Points”, is about ISIS terrorists who use the French representative at the contest in order to carry out an eye-popping terror attack on air.

>> When ISIS blows up the Eurovision in Israel

As first published on the Ynet website, the French broadcasting authority, informed the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation that if this series is aired, they would boycott the Eurovision contest. One reason for this is that, by chance, France will be represented this year by Bilal Hassani, a gay Muslim Frenchman, exactly like the series’ protagonist, a French-Algerian homosexual.

For now, the Broadcasting Corporation is not planning to pull the plug on the series, emphasizing that it’s a comic thriller that was written a year ago, unconnected to real events.

The series was created by Assaf Zelikovich and Yoav Hebel last year, right after Neta Barzilai won the contest in Lisbon.It is now in its final editing stages, includes French actors and was partly filmed in France.

In an interview published last month in Haaretz, the series’ creators said that it criticizes Israel, not France. “Many times, Mossad agents appear in series such as Kfulim (False Flag) or Hamidrasha (Mossad 101), and they’re always presented very seriously. We said – enough of that – we have to have some fun with it” said Hebel. “They are people like everyone else, sometimes messed up. They too have two kids at home and a wife reminding them to pick up diapers on their way. We put them in comic situations that bring out the human side of them.”

The European Broadcasting Union’s executive supervisor of the Eurovision, Jan Ola Sand, is currently in Israel. The Broadcasting Corporation says this is unconnected to the dispute with France.

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1.6955989Wed, 20 Feb 2019 21:00:05Ruth SchusterWed, 20 Feb 2019 13:16:19Why do zebras have stripes? There are more theories than zebras, but the latest explanation of their dichromatism is a doozy: The garish striping confuses bloodsucking horse flies, scientists at the University of Bristol reported in PNAS on Wednesday.

Instead of descending dexterously on their little feet and ramming their blood-siphon into the hapless animal, as they do with other quadrupeds and you, they tend to either miss the zebra entirely, or crash.

Bristol has no indigenous zebras but it does have horse flies – which, like our friend the rat, live everywhere in the world except the polar realms and some islands they happen not to have reached. Iceland is horse fly-free; England is not.

Horse flies look like house flies, but they’re bigger and the female sucks blood, slashing through skin with her mouth siphon armed with two pairs of blades. Like mosquitoes, horse flies can transfer deadly diseases, including anthrax and trypanosomiasis. So if there’s something that frustrates their ambitions, this is good to know. Zebra stripes seem to do just that, it turns out.

Prof. Tim Caro, Dr. Martin How and colleagues observed the behavior of horse flies around zebras and horses at a livery in North Somerset, using video analysis.

Horse flies can see the zebras perfectly well. Their predatory circling around horses and zebras was the same. Yet while making hay of the horses, the flies largely failed to land on the zebras.

“Horse flies just seem to fly over zebra stripes or bump into them, but this didn’t happen with horses,” Caro says.

When approaching a horse, the flies would decelerate like any self-respecting flying object and land properly. The upshot is that the flies experienced far fewer successful landings on zebras compared to horses.

But why? The answer seems to lie in their failure to adapt approach speed, because or coupled with the horse flies’ eyesight constraints.

Horse flies are proper flies and have large compound eyes, but the stripes may disrupt their visual system during their final approach, How postulates.

Zebra stripes and horse feathers

Could the difference in approach speed and/or landing ability be a matter of body odor? It seems not.

The scientists then tested fly behavior with the very same horses garbed in coats: black, white or zebra-striped. The horses wearing stripey coats experienced fewer successful horse fly landings versus when they wore single-color coats, the team wrote.

So there we have it. That may not be why the zebra evolved stripes. But it definitely shows that stripes are helpful.

One wonders if other colors would also be helpful in confusing the horse flies, but the team didn’t test horses decked out in pink and purple, for instance.

The team adds that zebras were relatively proactive about evading the horse flies. They were more likely to run away and swish their tails at the flies compared with the horses. So those flies that did successfully land on zebras spent less time there versus flies who alit onto horses – sometimes not even enough to grab a meal.

Conclusion: If your horses suffer from flies, or if you do, consider painting on stripes. It can’t hurt.

As said, for some reason, people seem to be profoundly preoccupied with the zebra's stripes.

Last year, scientists in Sweden had a go at addressing the issue of zebra stripes. Publishing in Nature Scientific Reports, they debunked an intriguing if weird theory that zebras evolved stripes in order to stay cool. Stripes create a mini-climate on fur, the theory went: The black stripes would get hotter than the white ones during the blistering African day, and as heated air above the black stripes collided with cooler air above the white stripes, small vortexes would form. That hypothesis turned out to be horse feathers.

Another Swedish study, from 2012, reported that tsetse flies – the cause of sleeping sickness in Africa – prefer dark animals to white ones under lab conditions. OK, so the zebra is halfway there.

Then there is the theory, brought up in late 2013, that flies aren’t the only ones discombobulated by the stripes. So are lions and other predators, suggested one Prof. Johannes Zanker. He’s a computational neuroscientist, not a zoologist.

Really? Camouflage en large? Maybe. Just look at a rotating barbershop pole or wagon wheel and think of a whole herd of animals on the move, Zanker said. The way these objects are actually moving, and the way we see them moving, are completely different.

Or it could be all the above, except for the micro-climate. Stripes, good. More stripes, more good.

]]>https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-netanyahu-to-right-wing-party-merge-with-kahanists-and-get-key-portfolios-1.6956512
1.6956512Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:46:40Chaim LevinsonWed, 20 Feb 2019 20:46:38Israeli far-right party Habayit Hayehudi has accepted an offer from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, a right-wing party led by followers of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, in exchange for the education and housing ministries in addition to two seats in the security cabinet. Furthermore, the 28th slot on the Likud ticket will be given to the newly merged party according to the agreement.

Habayit Hayedhui approved the agreement in a vote Wednesday evening.

Otzma Yehudit is led by former lawmaker Michael Ben-Ari, together with Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein, all former disciples and political descendants of Meir Kahane – the infamous American-rabbi-turned-Knesset-member whose vitriolic racism against Arabs got his Kach party banned from running in the 1988 election. Two years later, he was assassinated in a Manhattan hotel.

The Likud and Habayit Hayehudi said in a joint statement that during the election campaign the parties will not attack one another "but rather will strengthen one another for the sake of the right-wing victory."

>> Analysis: The Kahanists and the homophobes: The two parties no one wants but Netanyahu needs ■ I thought Bibi was amoral. He's not. He's evil. Thanks to him, Kahane lives | Opinion

Netanyahu said that "the next election is between a left-wing government headed by Lapid and Gantz and a right-wing government headed by me." Habayit Hayehudi, he said, "acted responsibly and managed to close ranks to ensure right-wing votes don't go to waste."

Netanyahu's Likud also signed Wednesday a surplus vote agreement with Habayit Hayehudi.

Benny Gantz's party said in response that "in our government there will be no Balad and no Kahane," referring to the Arab-majority party Balad. Gantz added: "Netanyahu has lost Zionism."

Habayit Hayehudi Chairman Rafi Peretz added: We won't let preachers from the left crown themselves as the leaders of the country. At the end of the process everyone will see that we were right."

Netanyahu's remarks come just hours after he canceled a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday because of assessments that his main rival, Benny Gantz, will join forces with Yesh Atid's Yair Lapid ahead of the election, sources in Likud said.

Netanyahu and Putin will speak on the phone on Thursday morning and a new date for a face-to-face meeting will be set, according to a diplomatic source. A Kremlin aide confirmed that Netanyahu canceled the meeting due to domestic political affairs, Russian media reported.

Thursday's meeting was meant to focus on regional affairs, the situation in Syria and the strengthening of the security coordination between Israel and Syria's armies. It would have been the first time the two leaders met in Moscow since the downing of the Russian spy plane in Syria in September 2018.

'God forbid'

Otzma Yehudit announced earlier Wednesday that they agreed to a merger with Habayit Hayehudi and the National Union, a day before the Thursday deadline to formally register party rosters for the April 9 election.

In a statement, Otzma Yehudit said the move would prevent "the establishment of a leftist government, God forbid."

The announcement, which received the blessing of right-wing rabbis affiliated with the party's leadership, followed pressure by Netanyahu on National Union chairman Bezalel Smotrich and his Habayit Hayehudi counterpart Rafi Peretz to unite with the far-right.

Both parties, whose leaders are due to meet later on Wednesday, still have to agree to finalize the union. Hawkish Smotrich had been thus far reluctant to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, fearing its far-right image would keep voters away. Habayit Hayehudi officials, led by MK Moti Yogev, are urging Peretz not to approve the agreement.

Otzma Yehudit officials agreed to a compromised discussed in recent days, placing its candidates on the 5th and 8th spots on the unified list. However, the party led by former National Union MK Michael Ben Ari and right-wing settler activists Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein, has yet to announce its candidates.

The party claimed that according to "all data and most recent polls," it would "secure at least four seats," but said it nonetheless chose to support a pro-settlement coalition and a right-wing government. In fact, most recent polls put Otzma Yehudit below the electoral threshold. Habayit Hayehudi is predicted around four out of 120 Knesset seats, leaving Otzma Yehudit with no guarantee that its representative would make it to the Knesset after the election.

National Union's Smotrich also said his party is still looking into a possible merger with former minister and Shas lawmaker Eli Yisahi's Yahad party. "I would very much like to see Eli Yishai enter into this bloc," he told public broadcaster Kan.

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1.6956865Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:27:17The Associated PressWed, 20 Feb 2019 18:21:15Nesma Ghanem is hoping for a fourth child even though her doctor says her body can’t handle a pregnancy at the moment. She has three daughters and would like them to have a brother.

“In the future he could support his father and the girls,” said Ghanem, 27, who lives in a village in Sohag, an area with one of Egypt’s highest fertility rates.

The family depends on her husband’s income from a local cafe. “If I have a son people, here in the village can say that he will carry on his father’s name,” she said.

>> Egypt's population grows by one million over last six months ■ With fertility rising, Israel is spared a demographic time bomb | Analysis

As Egypt’s population heads towards 100 million, the government is trying to change the minds of people like Ghanem. “Two Is Enough” is the government’s first family-planning campaign aiming to challenge traditions of large families in rural Egypt. But Ghanem’s wish to have a son shows how hard that could be.

“The main challenge is that we’re trying to change a way of thinking,” said Randa Fares, coordinator of the campaign at the Social Solidarity Ministry. “To change a way of thinking is difficult.”

Egypt’s population is growing by 2.6 million a year, a high rate for a country where water and jobs are scarce and schools and hospitals overcrowded. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi says the two biggest threats to Egypt are terrorism and population growth.

“We are faced with scarcity in water resources ... scarcity in jobs, job creation, and we need to really control this population growth so that people can feel the benefits of development,” Minister of Social Solidarity Ghada Wali told Reuters.

Decades ago, Egypt had a family-planning program, supported by the United States. The fertility rate fell from 5.6 children per woman in 1976 to 3.0 in 2008 while the use of contraceptives went up from 18.8 percent to 60.3 percent. Large amounts of contraceptives were made available and advertisements increased demand for birth control.

Support for family planning from the Egyptian government and large sums from donors helped make the program successful, said Duff Gillespie, who directed USAID’s population office from 1986 to 1993.

But Egypt was relying on donor support and when that assistance went away, family planning was neglected. By 2014 the fertility rate had gone up to 3.5. The United States is supporting family planning in Egypt again, providing more than $19 million for a five-year project ending in 2022 and $4 million for a smaller private sector project ending in 2020.

Those amounts are significantly lower than the $371 million the United States spent on family planning in Egypt between 1976 and 2008.

“Two Is Enough” is mainly financed by Egyptian money, with the Social Solidarity Ministry spending 75 million Egyptian pounds ($4.27 million) and the U.N. providing 10 million pounds, according to the ministry.

The two-year campaign targets more than 1.1 million poor families with up to three children. The Social Solidarity Ministry, with local NGOs, has trained volunteers to make home visits and encourage people to have fewer children.

Mothers are invited to seminars with preachers who say that Islam allows family planning, and doctors who answer questions. Billboards and TV ads promote smaller families. The government aims to reduce the current fertility rate of 3.5 to 2.4 by 2030.

At a session teaching volunteers how to speak to mothers and fathers about family planning in a village in Giza, Asmaa Mohammad, a 25-year-old volunteer, told Reuters she would rather have three children than two.

“Since I was a child I knew I wanted three children,” said Mohammad who is unmarried and doesn’t have children yet.

Deeply rooted traditions and lack of education explain why many Egyptians have big families. Al-Azhar, Egypt’s top Sunni Muslim authority, endorses family planning, but not all Egyptians agree.

Some view children as a future source of support. Others who only have girls keep having more until they get a boy who can carry on the family name.

During a visit from a campaign volunteer, Ghanem said her wish to have a boy was not the main reason she wasn’t using contraceptives. She stopped using an IUD after suffering from bleeding.

About one in three Egyptian women stop using contraceptives within a year, often due to misinformation about the side effects or lack of information about alternatives, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

Nearly 13 percent of married women of reproductive age in Egypt want to use contraceptives but are unable to, according to official data from 2014.

Now the government has renovated clinics, added staff and provided more free contraceptives. Under “Two is Enough” the goal is to have 70 new clinics up and running in March.

But when Reuters visited a clinic in Sohag last month, there were no contraceptives left. Nema Mahmoud, who had traveled from her village, was told to come back the next day.

Sohag, one of Egypt’s poorest governorates, also has one of the highest fertility rates at 4.3. The National Population Council said contraceptive use in Sohag is the lowest among six governorates surveyed.

For years Mahmoud, 33, didn’t use contraceptives consistently even though she wanted a small family. Her mother-in-law kept her from traveling to the city to get contraceptives when the local clinic was out, she said.

It was only after her mother-in-law died that she started using contraceptives properly. By then Mahmoud had three children and three miscarriages.

Since January, the government has limited cash assistance to poor families to two children instead of three in an attempt to push them to have fewer kids. Mahmoud will receive less cash every month. Her husband works only a few days a month, making 45 Egyptian pounds ($2.60) a day, she said.

Mahmoud and her neighbor Sanaa Mohammad, a 38-year-old mother of three, said the change should apply to new families, not women like them who already benefit from the program and have more than two children.

“It’s not fair to give someone something and then take it away,” said Mohammad.

The government sees the population boom as a threat to its economic reform plans. Every year, 800,000 young Egyptians enter the labor market, where unemployment is officially 10 percent.

In Egypt, population growth is around half the economic growth rate, but it should be no more than a third - otherwise it will be difficult to invest in social programs and improve living standards, said Magued Osman, chief executive of Baseera, the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research.

Analysts say Egypt should target people before they have children and sex education should be available in schools.

“Two Is Enough is good, but by itself it will not do the job,” said Abla Abdel Latif, executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies.

Wafaa Mohammad Amin, 36, a mother of four who works on “Two Is Enough”, got married at 17 and had her first child a year later. Two of her children were malnourished because she didn’t know how to breastfeed properly. She had to postpone her education and couldn’t work for years.

“There are many things I know now that I wish I had known back then,” she said. “I don’t want others to go through what I went through.”

]]>https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/team-hope-new-soccer-team-kicks-off-for-gaza-cancer-patients-1.6956770
1.6956770Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:17:11ReutersWed, 20 Feb 2019 17:55:21Fourteen-year-old Moatasem al-Nabeeh suffers from a brain tumour. A new youth soccer team set up in Gaza for young Palestinian cancer patients has given him new hope.

"I am happier now, I play and I made new friends," said al-Nabeeh. "They told us we can play, defy the disease and defeat it," he added as he hit the pitch for push-ups in his bright yellow and blue uniform.

Champions Academy, one of Gaza's biggest soccer schools, began setting up the team up five months ago and in February "Team Hope" kicked off. Its 18 players, aged between 12 and 17, have all been diagnosed with cancer, and compete against other, non-patient teams in the academy's league.

"Like children anywhere in Gaza, or in the world, those boys have ambitions, they want to become footballers and we are trying to help them achieve that," said Rajab Sarraj, CEO of Champions Academy.

Team Hope's players are exempt from school fees and train for one hour per week, with doctors' advice, Sarraj said.

Moatasem al-Nabeeh's mother, Suheir al-Nabeeh, said the soccer team has transformed her son's life.

"He was depressed and lonely all the time. He likes football and now he feels his life has value," she said.

Gaza, a narrow coastal strip that borders Egypt and Israel, is home to about two million Palestinians. Poverty and unemployment in the enclave run high.

Struggling with shortages of medical equipment and medicine, Gaza's hospitals are unable to provide proper care for cancer patients, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Khaled Thabet, chief oncologist at Gaza's largest hospital, Shifa, said most cancer patients need to be transferred to Israel, the West Bank or abroad in order to receive adequate medical treatment.

But Israel and Egypt keep tight control over their border crossings with Gaza, which is run by the Islamist Hamas group. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars over the past decade.

Patients need to apply for special permits from Israel to leave Gaza for treatment.

Israel, according to WHO, approved 75.6 percent of requests to exit Gaza for cancer treatment in 2018, an increase of 12 percent from 2017. Egypt has no restrictions on the travel of referred cancer patients from Gaza.

But such measures still fall short, Thabet said. "We are talking about 1,800 to 1,900 new cases per year. The problem is that such an increase in cases isn't met by an increase in treatment capabilities," said Thabet.

On Tuesday, the U.S-based the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF) inaugurated a new department at Gaza's Rantissi hospital dedicated to the treatment of children with cancer at the cost of $3.5 million.

Steve Sosebee, PCRF's president, said the facility will afford full treatment for 80 percent of Gaza's child patients, with the hope that eventually no child will need to travel to hospitals away from home.

"Until radiation therapy is permitted, until we can develop a bone marrow transplant department here, some kids do still have to travel outside for treatment," Sosebee told Reuters.

]]>https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/.premium-israelis-invent-risk-free-high-resolution-test-for-fetal-mutations-in-first-trimest-1.6956990
1.6956990Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:12:52Ruth SchusterWed, 20 Feb 2019 19:40:21Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a blood test to check a fetus for genetic problems in the first trimester, at infinitely greater resolution than existing techniques, and at zero risk to the mother or baby, they reported Wednesday in Genome Research journal.

The university is still working on commercialization of the blood test, but Prof. Noam Shomron of TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine is confident that one day, their breakthrough test will replace amniocentesis and microvilli testing, procedures done later in pregnancy that pose risks to either the mother or fetus.

For now the lab has proven its technology on samples from pregnancies as early as weeks 10 to 12, while amniocentesis for instance is typically done from the 14th week to the 20th.

Why did the university focus on weeks 10 to 12? “Just because that’s the samples we received,” Shomron told Haaretz. “We are trying to reduce this timeline to day 40.”

That is not a random aspiration. In Jewish practice, fetal termination is permissible until the 40th day of pregnancy, but existing technologies for genertic testing are much too late for that.

Amnio and microvilli testing are relatively crude tools that can detect abnormalities at the level of the chromosome – a missing section, for instance, involving millions upon millions of nucleotides.

“From amniocentesis, you could tell if an arm from chromosome 19 moved to another chromosome, for instance,” Shomron says. “Our method can find a single point mutation, a single change of nucleotide. It has far better resolution.”

Shomron, who led the research by TAU graduate students Tom Rabinowitz, Avital Polsky, Artem Danilevsky, Guy Shapira and Chen Raff, helpfully provides an analogy.

“Amniocentesis looks at chromosomes or parts of chromosomes to see if they are duplicated or not. It’s like looking at Planet Earth from outer space and asking if there’s another continent,” he says. Amnio can tell you if the baby has Down’s syndrome because that is caused by the presence of all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21 – which, in cellular terms, is huge. “We look at specific point mutations. It’s like looking at Planet Earth and finding a particular house in a particular street.”

The method involves taking tissue samples from both mother and father, and sequencing them.

Technically, the DNA from daddy can come from a cheek swab or “any tissue he’s willing to give,” and it’s just a reference point. Also technically, the DNA from mother could also come from her cheek or anywhere else, but blood is better. Why is that? Because her blood plasm has bits of that baby’s DNA in it too. That way they can obtain the mother’s pure DNA (from white blood cells – red blood cells don’t have DNA), and then obtain the baby’s DNA from the blood plasma.

“Our algorithm can tell whether the tiny pieces of DNA in the blood came from the mom or the fetus,” Shomron explains. And one needs the daddy DNA because they can subtract mother and father genomes from the equation and remain with information that is pure baby.

The norm has become to undergo genetic testing before getting pregnant, certainly in Israel, where certain populations have heightened propensity for genetic diseases, such as Tay Sachs among Ashkenazis and broad bean allergy among those of Middle—Eastern descent. Usually the tests cover about 30 common mutations.

But there are thousands upon thousands of detrimental, extremely rare mutations. This simple blood test, says Shomron, can scan for thousands of extremely rare but disabling mutations, and help the parents plan ahead. Knowing the father’s DNA can not only help track down the source of a mutation, but help to calculate its recessivity or dominance.

The team believes that its algorithm, used on the sequencing results, will predict mutations in the fetus with 99% or better accuracy, depending on the mutation type. “The practical applications are endless: a single blood test that would detect a wide range of genetic diseases, such as Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis and many others,”

DNA chips, the latest wrinkle in fetal testing, are also much cruder in output than the future blood test.

Asked about the future, Shomron explains that the technique was developed in the TAU lab and the university is working on commercializing it, transferring the technology to private companies.

The work was done in collaboration with Dr. David Golan of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Prof. Lina Basel-Salmon and Dr. Reut Tomashov-Matar of Rabin Medical Center.

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1.6955024Wed, 20 Feb 2019 19:20:16Aaron RabinowitzWed, 20 Feb 2019 19:20:20Two relatives of a couple that was murdered in Jerusalem last month have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the murder. A gag order prevents the publication of their names or their relationship with Yehuda and Tamar Kaduri.

The two are husband and wife. The husband is related to the couple and is suspected with involvement in the murder and is held without bail for eight days while his wife is suspected of conspiracy and obstruction of justice and has been ordered held without bail for six days.

The Kaduris, aged 71 and 68, were found dead in their apartment in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanetziv neighborhood after their children had been trying unsuccessfully to reach them by phone for a few days. The police found the door locked when they arrived, with no signs of a break-in, but the couple had stab wounds on their bodies.

>> Palestinian janitor held for weeks in Jerusalem murder case, shown no evidence

Police initially suspected a murder-suicide. But after additional evidence emerged, they concluded that husband and wife had been killed by others.

Shai Shlomi, the lawyer representing both suspects, said that while the gag order limits what he can say, his clients consider the arrest “a complete mix-up” and believe the truth will come out. He said they are considering appealing the police’s decision to keep them in detention, adding that his clients had “no motive” to murder the couple.

While the murderer must be brought to justice, Shlomi added, “It’s completely clear that it wasn’t these people, and it’s clear they had no involvement in it.”

“We think the police have hit a dead end and are making arrests too lightly,” he continued. “People have been arrested in this case and then released after long days of interrogation. The police opposed the release, but the district court ultimately ordered it.”

Shlomi was referring to the main suspect in the murder, who was released last week after having spent more than three weeks in detention. That suspect, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who cleaned the building where the couple lived, was freed by the district court after it concluded that the suspicions against him were weak and that police had found no evidence to support their theory.

“From the first moment, I said I had no connection to the murder,” the cleaner said after his release. “They also never showed me any evidence. ... They told me I was suspected of murder. Do you know anyone from East Jerusalem who isn’t suspected of something?”

Two weeks ago, the couple’s children and their lawyer, Itamar Ben-Gvir, held a press conference at which they accused the police and the Shin Bet security service of dragging their feet on the case. Ben-Gvir, a longtime far-right activist, said the Shin Bet was refusing to use the full range of tools normally brought to bear in cases of suspected terrorist murder and that the police were “looking in the easy places.”

One of the couple’s sons said the trauma of the murder had been compounded by the “utter unreceptiveness of the authorities.”

]]>https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/full-list-the-parties-and-candidates-running-in-israel-s-election-1.6955905
1.6955905Wed, 20 Feb 2019 19:07:55HaaretzWed, 20 Feb 2019 13:09:15As Israel's April 9 election approaches, following are the lists of candidates for all major political parties, in order of their performance in recent public opinion polls. With a Thursday deadline to formally register party rosters in sight, possible mergers and changes are still on the table.

Shas, Kulanu and the newly merged far-right list led by Habayit Hayehudi, National Union and Otzma Yehudit are expected to announce their Knesset tickets later on Wednesday. Likud and Labor, meanwhile, have several spots reserved for candidates selected personally by party leaders. These will also be finalized by Thursday.

A decision on a possible merger of Arab-majority parties Hadash and United Arab List-Balad is also pending.

According to the military statement, the attack was done from the air. Palestinian military reported that the attack was east of the Al-Bureij refugee camp.

A balloon-borne incendiary device sent from Gaza started a fire Tuesday in the Kissufim Forest near the Gaza border. The fire was fairly small and was put out quickly. The incendiary balloon comes a few days after Hamas approved a renewal of these attacks in light of stalled talks on lifting the closure of the Gaza Strip.

A senior Hamas political official told Haaretz that the organization did not want to go “all out” against Israel, so as to allow Egyptian-mediated talks to continue. However, Hamas said that Israel has been trying to impose quiet on the Strip by means of Qatari money, and senior Hamas officials said recently that the organization would not stop the protests at the border fence in exchange for the money.

Senior Hamas official Fathi Hamad said on Tuesday at a rally on Gaza’s northern beach that the continued closure on Gaza would lead to “an explosion.” He said that the Palestinians would break through the border fence if Israel did not go back to implementing understandings meant to lead to quiet. “Our patience is waning and the tools of the marches of return are escalating every week,” he said.

The chairman of the western Negev’s Eshkol Regional Council, Gadi Yarkoni, called on Knesset members to act. “The communities of the Gaza border are part of Israel. At this time, with candidates for the Knesset expressing themselves, tweeting, holding parlor meetings and rallies and asking for our vote, I call on voters, on all Israelis: Ask them – what is your policy for Gaza and against the balloon terror? Because the Gaza border area is Israel. Today it’s here and tomorrow it will be where you are.”

Late last year Hamas activists began to send incendiary devices attached to balloons and kites from the Gaza Strip into Israel, starting numerous fires and leading to losses of cultivated fields and natural open spaces. Some of the balloons and kites landed in kindergartens near the Gaza Strip. In response to the balloons and kites and to criticism by Gaza border area residents, the IDF has begun to attack targets in the Strip.

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1.6956667Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:26:08HaaretzWed, 20 Feb 2019 16:32:16Tal Russo, a former general who was placed on the number two slot in the Labor Party's ticket on Tuesday ahead of the April 9 election, told reporters that real security for Israel means "separating from the Palestinians."

“Our vision and our interest is to part ways with the Palestinians, and the way there is a regional solution of neighboring countries as well as the two-state solution,” he said at a press conference Wednesday. He added that “we must not allow the Palestinians to lead us to a single state with an Arab majority. That would be going against our grandfathers and grandmothers who came to build a Jewish state.”

Russo was placed second on the Labor Party ticket. His roles in the army included commander of the Southern Command, commander of the so-called Depth Corps (which coordinates long-range Israeli army activity deep in "enemy territory"), and head of the Operations Directorate.

Russo said that he and Labor Party Chairman Avi Gabbay share a worldview about Israel’s future and security. “I was glad that Avi called on me to be part of the team he is leading,” the ex-general told the press. "Today I don a new uniform, in the service of the State of Israel."

Russo said that he had grown up on the principles of the Labor Party, “including security first, then a hand outstretched for peace.” He also said that Israel is being weakened by lack of unity and that things could be done differently.

Gabbay also attended the press conference, contributing that the rival party Likud “is morally bankrupt,” after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his support for a merger between the right-wing parties abayit Hayehudi, the National Union, and the Jewish National Front.

The nine were found guilty of taking part in the bombing that killed Hisham Barakat, the first assassination of a senior official in Egypt in a quarter century. Barakat was also the most senior official killed since the military overthrew an elected but divisive Islamist president in 2013.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media, said the families of the men were told to pick up their bodies from a Cairo morgue.

A total of 15 people have been executed in Egypt since the start of the year. Three were hanged earlier this month for their involvement in the 2014 killing of a judge’s son in the Nile Delta town of Mansoura. Authorities executed another three for killing a police officer in Cairo in September 2013. Rights groups decried the executions, saying the men were sentenced to death following torture and beatings to extract confessions.

According to rights groups, authorities have executed at least 165 people since July 2013, including at least 32 between January and November 2018.

By carrying out the executions, Egypt demonstrated an “absolute disregard for the right to life,” said Najia Bounaim, North Africa campaign director for Amnesty International.

“The international community must not stay silent over this surge in executions. Egypt’s allies must take a clear stand by publicly condemning the authorities’ use of the death penalty, the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment,” she said.

The London-based group on Tuesday had called on Egypt to halt the latest executions, saying that some defendants said they were forcibly disappeared and confessed under torture.

Egypt’s highest appeals court upheld the death sentences in November. It commuted six other death sentences to life in prison. Death sentences were also handed down in 2017 to 13 defendants tried in absentia. They will be eligible for a new trial if they surrender or are captured. Turkey deported one of the 13 last month.

The Muslim Brotherhood was Egypt’s best-organized opposition movement for decades and won a series of elections after an Arab Spring uprising in 2011 ended President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly three-decade rule.

But President Mohammed Morsi, a senior Brotherhood figure elected in 2012, proved divisive, and the military removed him from power amid mass protests against his rule a year later.

Since then, authorities have waged an extensive crackdown on Islamists, arresting and detaining thousands and sentencing them to harsh prison terms. The Brotherhood has been banned and declared a terrorist group.

Islamic militants have, meanwhile, stepped up attacks since Morsi’s 2013 overthrow. An Islamic State affiliate based in the northern Sinai Peninsula has repeatedly targeted security forces and the Christian minority. Another group, known as Hasm, which has targeted security forces, has been linked to the Brotherhood.

The assassination of Barakat recalled one of Egypt’s darkest chapters, when Islamic militants and the state security apparatus engaged in retaliatory killings for nearly a decade starting in 1990. That year, the militants gunned down Parliament speaker Rifaat el-Mahgoub in Cairo, the last assassination of a senior official. There were attempts against other ministers until the insurgency was crushed in the late 1990s.

Also on Wednesday the military said in a statement that security forces killed eight suspected militants and destroyed seven hideouts and weapons depots and two car bombs in the restive north of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The military statement gave no time frame for the recent operations. It wasn’t possible to independently confirm the details as access to northern Sinai is heavily restricted.

Wednesday’s statement came days after the Islamic State claimed an attack on an army checkpoint in northern Sinai left 15 troops and seven militants dead.

Egypt has been battling Islamic militants for years. Last year, the government launched a broad security operation focused on northern Sinai, where an Islamic State affiliate has carried out many attacks in recent years.

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1.6954247Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:47:29Nettanel SlyomovicsWed, 20 Feb 2019 17:47:31James Cameron can be critiqued for any number of reasons, but impatience isn’t one of them. The director of “The Terminator” and “Titanic” sincerely wanted to make the film “Alita: Battle Angel” himself, but wanting wasn’t enough. For almost 20 years he planned for the Japanese comic book heroine to be the star of his next picture, but repeatedly set that aside “temporarily” in favor of another project that grabbed his attention. Finally, after committing to three simultaneous sequels to his 2009 epic “Avatar,” he decided to give his baby to a different director, though without really letting go.

An aficionado of science fiction with women at the forefront, Cameron was quick to obtain the rights to “Gunnm,” a series of comics created by Yukito Kishiro 30 years ago. So enthusiastic was he about the project that back in 2000 he registered an internet domain name for it, and only then set about writing the screenplay, and then another screenplay, a rewrite and yet another rewrite. In fact, before making the final decision to have Robert Rodriguez direct, he auditioned him covertly. He handed Rodriguez, who directed “Sin City” and “Desperado,” a script of twice the usual length, along with 600 pages of notes. Rodriguez came back with a new draft satisfactory to Cameron and got the nod as the film’s director, complete with a $170 million budget and an emotionally involved supreme producer.

Cyberpunk style

In “Alita,” the year is 2563. Hundreds of years have passed since a catastrophic war ravaged the planet and left behind a cyberpunk aesthetic. Only one city, Zalem, remains as vibrant testimony to a magnificent civilization that existed in the past. Zalem floats above the underprivileged Iron City on the ground below, draws energy and resources from it, and also dumps refuse on it, which residents consider a treasure.

The symbolism is not complex. Everyone in Iron City fantasizes about being on Zalem, but it’s strictly off-limits. In fact, no one has seen the city above and returned to tell the tale. It’s accessible only via a murderous mass sport called motorball – which offers players something like the odds of winning the lottery, but where making a mistake about the “extra number” ends in a beheading.

As befits a post-apocalyptic world in cyberpunk style, most of the characters have undergone a variety of transplants; they exist on the spectrum between a human and a machine with a mohawk. One day, Dr. Ido, a physician and scientist who specializes in technological and digital upgrading, finds a severed head. He hurries home to attach an artificial body, and the result is the cyborg Alita. Lacking any memory of her former life, Alita accepts Dr. Ido as a loving father figure. She then sets out to discover the world, equipped with a healthy curiosity about herself, the urban fabric she encounters and a sympathetic young man named Hugo.

So it is that we become acquainted with the different sides of Iron City, beautiful and ugly alike, which together forge a peculiar composite of stories. The attempt to throw everything possible into the picture produces a world of headhunters prone to upgrading their bodies into killing machines – but also the kind of romantic moment found in teen dramas. The whole is interwoven with a dramatic plot revolving around a murderous sport involving a ball, electric rollerblades and a license to commit wholesale murder on the playing field.

If all this is confusing, that’s only logical. The best way to explain what the film is about is to note that the plot doesn’t get in the way of the action. Each development is designed to lead Alita, like a piece on a chessboard, to the next square. Thus, from one battle to the next, from villain to villain, Alita uncovers something new about her past, about the world and about her abilities and skills.

Since the picture depicts a journey of self-discovery, Rodriguez doesn’t spend as much time constructing a narrative as he does in leading Alita into dark corners that stir memories of her former life as a warrior.

The action itself successfully blends the two worlds of the director and the producer. The special effects maintain Cameron’s standards – he is continuing to work with the team behind “Avatar” – and even if there are no breakthroughs this time, Cameron’s influence is palpable. Rodriguez, directing at an enjoyable, fast-paced clip, preserves high momentum throughout, almost without stumbling. He also shows a certain fondness for digital blood, which is seemingly partially tempered in a world where the body is mechanical, but not always. As the movie advances and the audience becomes more familiar with its visual aspects, the sight of amputated limbs takes on an increasingly sadistic cast.

By infusing the digital character with a sense of humanity, Rosa Salazar mitigates the particularly violent moments. The heroine encounters no few villains along the way, from the headhunters to the mysterious ex-wife of Dr. Ido, played by Jennifer Connelly (“Requiem for a Dream”), and the head honcho of motorball, played by Mahershala Ali. All of them, without exception, underestimate her, but she pays them no heed. From battle to battle, Alita discovers she is a master of an ancient form of cyborg combat, one that was lost centuries earlier and which for some reason is known only to her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she’s from or how to eat an orange, but one fist raised in her direction is enough to make her react instinctively and tear people apart.

The close attention Cameron devotes to creating the mythology of the new world translates into striking visuals, and beyond special effects, the digital world is interwoven with live-action shots. There is an impressive seamlessness between the world that’s photographed and the computerized world, enabling viewers to adapt to the distorted scene in which the story unfolds. It’s worth noting, in this connection, that the heroine’s huge eyes, which unnerved me a bit in the trailer, took only a little getting used to at the start of the film, and didn’t disturb me in the least afterward.

Bold arrogance

What does cast a pall on the movie is the sequel malady that has afflicted blockbusters in recent years. The attempt to foist on a film the loose ends of future plots sabotages “Alita,” too, though here it’s done with a kind of bold arrogance that’s easily attributable to Cameron. Rodriguez responded to his critics in advance, saying in interviews that for him the story is Alita’s self-discovery – who she is, where she came from – and, as such, the film stands on its own. Nevertheless, it’s not so much that the ending leaves an opening for a sequel, but that it confidently assumes one is on the way. The result: an inordinate number of questions are left unresolved. The only thing missing was a formal “to be continued.”

Still, “Alita” is an epic-scale movie that achieves its goal. At the same time, the action never stops, robotic bodies are atomized as though there’s no tomorrow, and a small woman proves to hosts of upgraded men that size doesn’t matter. Over and above all this, the story contains the simplistic but effective foundation stones that are identified with Cameron: He is preoccupied with issues of social class and the way they shape the physical world.

Perhaps if Cameron hadn’t waited two decades, the picture would not have been swallowed up between films like “Mortal Engines” (2018) and “Ghost in the Shell” (2017) which address similar issues by means of a similar visual world. But in contrast to many of his colleagues in the industry who have embarked on the post-apocalyptic path, Cameron is not immersed in existential depression. Alita and her wide eyes express incorrigible optimism – a refreshing change on the big screen these days.

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1.6956480Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:47:12The Associated PressWed, 20 Feb 2019 15:44:26A convoy of trucks carrying hundreds of civilians, including men, women and children, left the last enclave held by Islamic State militants in eastern Syria on Wednesday, signaling a possible end to a standoff that has lasted for more than a week.

An Associated Press team in Baghouz, a village near the Iraqi border where the Islamic State group is making its final stand, counted at least 17 trucks that emerged through a humanitarian corridor used in past weeks to evacuate people from the militants' last patch of territory along the Euphrates River.

Women, children and men, some with checkered headscarves, or keffiyehs, could be seen through a flap opening on the flatbed trucks. One man carried a crutch; the women were engulfed in conservative black garments covering their faces known as niqabs.

Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, the U.S.-backed militia spearheading the fight against ISIS in Syria, confirmed the trucks were carrying civilians out of the enclave.

It was not immediately clear if ISIS militants were also on board the trucks. Around 300 militants are believed to be holed up in the enclave, along with several hundred civilians. On Tuesday, Bali said a military operation aimed at ousting the extremists from the area will begin if they don't surrender, adding that such an operation would take place after separating or evacuating the civilians from the militants

An SDF commander, Zana Amedi, said most of the militants remaining inside the enclave are seriously wounded or sick.

The Islamic State group has been reduced from its self-proclaimed "caliphate" that once spread across much of Syria and Iraq at its height in 2014 to a speck of land on the countries' shared border.

The SDF has been encircling the remaining ISIS-held territory for days, waiting to declare the territorial defeat of the extremist group.

Nearly 20,000 civilians had left the shrinking area in recent weeks before the evacuation halted last week when the militants closed all the roads out of the tiny area.

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1.6956430Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:43:23ReutersWed, 20 Feb 2019 15:39:45British Prime Minister Theresa May said on Wednesday she never thought she would see the opposition Labour party being accused by a former member of anti-Semitism.

"I never thought I would see the day when Jewish people ... were concerned about their future in this country," she said in parliament. "And I never thought I would see the day when a once-proud Labour party was accused of institutional anti-Semitism by a former member of that party."

>> Corbyn’s Labour Will Never Stop Gaslighting Jews | Opinion

On Monday, seven Labour lawmakers quit over leader Jeremy Corbyn's approach to Brexit and a row over anti-Semitism, saying Britain's main opposition party had been "hijacked by the machine politics of the hard left".

On Wednesday, yet another lawmaker quit, claiming that the Labour Party is "infected" with "Anti-Jewish Racism."

Take Tina Shamenashvili, the owner of a small general store in one of the city’s predominantly Russian-speaking neighborhoods.

“There’s nobody who can replace Bibi,” she says, referring to the prime minister by his nickname. She has always voted for his Likud party and promises to do so again come Election Day on April 9.

“I have two kids in the army now protecting our country, and I know they’re in good hands with Bibi,” says Shamenashvili, who still speaks with a slight Russian accent despite having moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union nearly 25 years ago. “I just don’t get all these army generals who want to oust him. A nice word and a little support wouldn’t hurt them,” she adds.

Yet support for Netanyahu and his party appears to be dissipating in this large southern city, located on the Mediterranean coast.

On the other side of town, Nelly, a Russian-speaker who works as a manicurist at a local beauty shop (and requested that her full name not be published), said that although she voted Likud in the last election, she was “one million percent” certain she would not do so again. She still hasn’t decided which party will get her vote.

The same holds true for Rosti (who also asked that his surname not be published), who with his wife Svetlana – both of them from Ukraine – runs a small flower shop here.

“For the past 25 years I’ve lived here, I’ve always voted Likud,” he says. “I thought Bibi was the future of Israel, that he would bring peace. But something about him has changed – it seems like he’s only interested in solving our problems abroad and doesn’t care about what’s happening inside the country.”

Rosti says he was inclined to vote for Yesh Atid, the centrist party headed by Yair Lapid, but was not ruling out Hosen L’Yisrael – the brand-new party created by former Israeli army Chief of Staff Benny Gantz. “We need a change, and the two of them look like the type of people who can get things done,” Rosti says, adding, “Bibi’s been in office for too long.”

Shabbat war

With a population of 225,000, Ashdod has long been a Likud stronghold. In the last election in 2015, the party captured about one-third of the vote here. By contrast, the main opposition party, Zionist Union, barely won 10 percent.

In the 1990s, the city took in many Russian-speakers, who were part of the mass immigration wave from the former Soviet Union. Today, about one in every three residents here is a Russian-speaker. That could explain why the party second to Likud in the city is Yisrael Beiteinu, headed by former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (himself an immigrant from the former Soviet Union). Yisrael Beiteinu is a right-wing party whose main constituency is Russian speakers, the vast majority of them not religious. For the better part of the past four years, it served in Netanyahu’s coalition government.

But a year ago, something shifted in the city: A new law was passed prohibiting most shops in Israel from operating on Shabbat. At the time, the ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) parties held a large share of the seats on the city council and were able to pressure Yehiel Lasri – the mayor now serving his third term – into slapping fines on shops that continued to stay open despite the new prohibition. The city’s nonreligious residents – a disproportionately large share of them Russian-speakers – took to the streets in protest.

Week after week, thousands would show up at City Hall on Saturday nights to vent their anger. The mayor eventually caved and ordered law enforcement authorities to stop issuing the fines.

Last October, when municipal elections were held, the mayor just retained his seat, but the ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition were largely booted out. Voter turnout, it emerged, was much higher than in previous municipal elections, with nonreligious residents coming out in full force. These days, residents say, the mayor wouldn’t even dream of touching businesses that stay open on Shabbat.

Katya Kupchik, director of the Russian-speaking division at Be Free Israel (also known as Israel Hofsheet) – an organization that promotes religious freedom in the country – says last year’s protests against the so-called supermarket law were a game-changer.

“It’s amazing when you think about it,” she says, “that after all they’ve had to put up with in this country – like the constant questions about how Jewish they are – this was the issue that brought the Russian-speakers out to the streets. I guess it’s because big ideological issues like religious freedom and Jewish pluralism don’t really speak to them. But when you tell them they can’t go to the store on Shabbat to buy milk or baby formula, that’s hitting them close to home,” says Kupchik.

Unlike their parents, members of the younger generation of Russian-speakers in Israel are “super-Israeli,” notes Kupchik. “They grew up here, they speak Hebrew, and they consume their news in Hebrew. When political parties don’t deliver on their promises to them, they look elsewhere. That’s why many are starting to look toward the center.”

Generation gap

Alex Panov is a case in point. A 29-year-old Ashdodi, he was born in Ukraine and moved to Israel at age 2. After a stint in Tel Aviv, where he worked in high-tech, he returned to the port city a few years ago to fight for a cause close to his heart: public transportation on Shabbat. Until that becomes a reality, though, Panov is running the local branch of Shabus – a cooperative that provides a limited form of bus service on Shabbat.

A leading activist in last year’s protests against the supermarket law, Panov predicts that both Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu will take a beating here in the upcoming election.

“Lieberman, for one, doesn’t represent the young generation here,” he says. “He’s been sitting in the government for 20 years, and all he does is spew hate. Unfortunately, the older generation is still loyal to him.”

As for Likud, Panov continues, despite the party’s purported liberalism, its lawmakers voted in favor of the controversial law. “I believe it’s going to cost them in the election,” he says. “I see them losing votes to both Lapid and Gantz.”

Russian-speaking voters, even the younger ones, still feel uncomfortable with the term “leftist,” Panov explains, which is why he doesn’t believe many will be moving to parties affiliated with the left, like Labor or Meretz.

Panov recently took a poll among 30 of his friends locally to see how they planned to vote in April. “Not one of them supports Lieberman, and only two of them told me they planned to vote Likud,” he reports.

And him? “I’m voting Yesh Atid,” he says. “I like the center.”

Surprise candidate

Like many of the local residents approached here while going about their daily errands, Aleksandr Koff has yet to make up his mind. A 45-year-old father of two, he moved to Israel with his parents from Ukraine in 1995. In between jobs at the moment, he says he’s done well for himself but is concerned for others like his parents, who have a hard time making ends meet.

“I have my own car, so I don’t need public transportation on Shabbat. But so many people I know do,” he says.

Koff has voted Likud in the past, and says it deserves credit for the strong Israeli economy. “But it doesn’t look like I’m going to vote for Bibi this time around,” he says. “I feel that, lately, he just doesn’t see ordinary people, people who live from hand to mouth, retirees – they don’t exist for him.” His parents, he believes, will stick with Lieberman. “They don’t really know anything else.”

Asked what direction he’s leaning toward, Koff says: “Maybe Benny Gantz. I need to learn a little bit more about him. He kind of caught us all by surprise.”

Oleg Moldavski, 36, believes many Ashdodis will punish Likud in the election for supporting the supermarket law.

“It was always a major power in this city, but I really believe it’s going to have less influence now,” he says. A former Likud supporter, he’s still not completely sure which party will get his vote in April, but says he’s leaning toward Yisrael Beiteinu. When asked about the center parties, he replies that Lapid “is not a leader” and, as for Gantz, “I’ve heard rumors that he’s really a leftist.”

Jojo Abutbul, a popular radio broadcaster who’s lived virtually his entire life here, is widely known to have his fingers on the pulse of the city. According to him, it’s still way too early to write off Likud.

“I remember a time when there was another centrist party, Kadima, that took lots of votes from Likud,” he recounts. “Eventually, those voters came back home. I believe Likud will stay strong here.”

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1.6955807Wed, 20 Feb 2019 14:07:54Alona FerberWed, 20 Feb 2019 14:07:40"I cannot remain in a political party that I have today come to the sickening conclusion is institutionally anti-Semitic…The [Labour] leadership has willfully and repeatedly failed to address hatred against Jewish people within its ranks, and it is for these reasons and many more that I have made this decision today. I am leaving behind a culture of bullying, bigotry and intimidation."

On Monday, when seven MP’s quit the UK Labour party and sent earthquake-grade tremors through British politics, Luciana Berger’s comments made clear that, certainly for her, the resignation was not only political and professional, but also personal.

A Jewish woman (and a heavily pregnant one at that), Berger has been on the receiving end of widely-reported anti-Semitic and misogynistic abuse, as well as deselection threats in her Liverpool constituency.

Seeing a Jewish member of a mainstream party resign, at least in part, over anti-Jewish prejudice, was chilling. After years of back-and-forth over anti-Semitism in Labour, of accusations of anti-Jewish intimidation, unprecedented Jewish community protests, and death-spiral bad faith, it should have been a sobering moment.

That didn’t happen. The reaction perfectly exemplified how stuck the discussion is. After a good few rounds of the Labour and anti-Semitism news cycle on rinse and repeat, lines are drawn in the same place in the sand. One side believes the leadership has not done enough about anti-Jewish prejudice, and/or is fully complicit with it; the other that those complaining are making too much of a fuss, giving in to "hysteria."

Some empathetic voices, such as Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson, did speak out. "They say anti-Semitism is a light sleeper...this is certainly a wake-up call for the Labour party," Watson stated, describing the resignations as a "moment of regret and reflection."

The party's leader was less specific when it came to the anti-Semitism issue.

Jeremy Corbyn’s tweets in response to the resignations expressed “disappointment" and talked about, among other things, the Tory bungling of Brexit. Speaking on Tuesday, he said he regretted the MPs' decision to leave and hoped "they recognize they were elected to Parliament on a [Labour] manifesto."

That was more a call, or threat, for a by-election, to remove their public platform and representative status, than any engagement with the issues the rebels had raised. The word "anti-Semitism" was notably absent in any of his responses for two days after the MPs' exit.

On Wednesday, in Parliament, he finally addressed the issue with a pro forma statement: "Antisemitism has no place whatsoever in any of our political parties...[Labour was taking the] strongest action" against anti-Semitism.

The now-eight ex-Labour rebels (Enfield North MP Joan Ryan joined Tuesday), joined Wednesday by three Conservative MPs, who cited the politics of the current Labour leadership, their facilitation of Brexit and anti-Semitism as reasons for leaving, have been roundly branded as traitors or heroes, depending on which side of the vacuum that is the center ground of British politics you sit on.

When it came to the anti-Semitism accusations, plenty of voices reiterated the gaslighting that has become a ubiquitous function of this prejudice.

Secretary General of the UK’s biggest union, Unite, Len McCluskey, a key Corbyn ally, told the BBC on Monday that "the issue around anti-Semitism" is "grossly unfair" and that "the whole thing is contrived." In a Guardian piece that day, he said the reasons the MPs gave for leaving "do not stand up to scrutiny," that the party was challenging anti-Semitism with "new energy," and bleated: "It is not clear what more Labour is expected to do."

At least he’s consistent: in 2017, McCluskey declared the accusations of anti-Semitism in Labour were just "mood music" created by people who were "trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn,” and that "those who wish to hold Corbyn to account can expect to be held to account themselves."

The youth wing of the Labour Party tweeted, "Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here," in response to the rebels’ departure. Usual suspect Ken "Hitler was a Zionist" Livingstone reiterated his belief that he has never (ever) seen any anti-Semitism in the party (ever).

George Galloway, expelled from Labour in 2003 for calling for the Iraqi resistance to kill British soldiers, who infamously commented on losing his seat in parliament in 2015 that those celebrating his loss were "the venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists," and this week applied to be re-admitted to the party, opined that the criticism against Corbyn was a "Black Op" and, characteristically, went full-Nazi analogy: it was a "Goebellian lie" to suggest the Labour leader was anti-Semitic.

It did not help matters that, only a few hours after the launch of the "Independent Group," MP Angela Smith "misspoke" (as she put it in a video statement), after appearing to say on live TV that black and minority ethnic people have a "funny tinge."

The efforts of the Corbyn faithful to delegitimize the rebels wholesale for that plainly offensive comment cannot detract from the fact that Berger, who went to Labour's party conference with a police escort last year following death threats, reached a point where she felt she had to resign because of prejudice directed at her.

Berger was not the only Jewish member to announce a resignation on Monday. Adam Langleben, a former Labour councillor in London and senior member of the Jewish Labour Movement, also cited the party becoming "institutionally racist" in his resignation letter.

Corbyn's Labour "has been corrupted and indoctrinated by people who are authoritarian in their approach to politics, encourage democratic structures that lead to bullying mob rule, and above all else, are racist towards Jews," he wrote. "All minorities should, and I believe will eventually have significant reason to worry about your (Jeremy Corbyn's) rise to leadership of the Labour party."

This one episode of the whole anti-Semitism saga is another reminder that not enough people take the concerns of Jews seriously, despite the qualitative and quantitative indicators that anti-Semitism is far from being consigned to the history books.

In the UK, the number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded rose to 1,652 in 2018, marking a new high for the third straight year. According to statistics released last week, France saw a 74 per cent increase in the number of offenses against Jews last year and in Germany, violent anti-Semitic attacks have risen by 60 per cent.

That tangible threat level is complemented by a psychological state of siege, particularly for the Jewish community. A 28-nation Eurobarometer poll last month showed 89 per cent of Jews said anti-Semitism had "significantly increased" in the past five years; the same was true only for 36 per cent of the general public.

The issue of anti-Semitism continues to spike in the news headlines. Both in the UK and across the Atlantic, political debates are replete with is-it-or-isn’t-it discussions of anti-Semitism, amid a broader wave of nativist populism and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The resurgence and coverage of anti-Semitism is a red light. It indicates that what’s going on in Britain is far bigger than the Labour story. It is about a tolerance to prejudiced attitudes that has a long and slippery slope. Beyond the Labour Party, Jews together with other minorities have reason to be worried at growing expressions of bigotry against difference.

On the day of the resignations, the anti-racist group Hope not Hate’s annual "State of Hate" report found that 35 percent of respondents in a UK poll thought Islam was generally a threat to the British way of life. In an increasingly divided Brexit Britain, amid a rise in public xenophobia, the report found that "anti-Muslim hatred has become increasingly mainstreamed, with the conflation of cultural incompatibility and global threat...no longer quarantined to the margins."

If even one member of one of the UK's two major parties explicitly cites intimidation and bullying on account of their culture and ethnic origin as the reason they have to quit their political home, we should all take notice. Those continuing to claim Labour doesn’t have a racism problem, when a Jewish Labour MP sees no option but to quit, is clearly in a deep state of denial.

Can those hardcore deniers honestly imagine Labour’s anti-Semitism saga is just political spin? Or that it’s only a problem for Jews? There’s good reason that anti-Semitism is referred to as the "canary in the mine," an indicator and a warning about the overall state of health of a liberal democracy.

As Joan Ryan put it in her resignation letter: "What starts with Jews never ends with Jews…The mindset, ideology and worldview that tolerates anti-Semitism poses a threat to the British public, Jew and non-Jew alike."

>> Read more: Yemen's war is a mercenary heaven. Are Israelis reaping the profits?

He appeared to be referring to the report, released Tuesday, which said senior White House officials pushed a project to share nuclear power technology with Saudi Arabia despite the objections of ethics and national security officials. He also referred to the killing of writer Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in October.

The Trump administration withdrew from a 2015 international agreement aimed at preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, saying it did not go far enough in restricting Tehran's nuclear activities.

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1.6955992Wed, 20 Feb 2019 13:43:39ReutersWed, 20 Feb 2019 13:18:58Russia will respond to any U.S. deployment of short or intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe by targeting not only the countries where they are stationed, but the United States itself, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

In his toughest remarks yet on a potential new arms race, Putin said Russia was not seeking confrontation and would not take the first step to deploy missiles in response to Washington's decision this month to quit a landmark Cold War-era arms control treaty.

But he said that Russia's reaction to any deployment would be resolute and that U.S. policy-makers, some of whom he said were obsessed with U.S. exceptionalism, should calculate the risks before taking any steps.

"It's their right to think how they want. But can they count? I'm sure they can. Let them count the speed and the range of the weapons systems we are developing," Putin told Russia's political elite to strong applause.

"Russia will be forced to create and deploy types of weapons which can be used not only in respect of those territories from which the direct threat to us originates, but also in respect of those territories where the centers of decision-making are located," he said.

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1.6955839Wed, 20 Feb 2019 11:53:04Jonathan LisWed, 20 Feb 2019 11:45:34Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday because of assessments that his main rival, Benny Gantz, will join forces with Yesh Atid's Yair Lapid ahead of the election, sources in Likud said Wednesday.

Netanyahu and Putin will speak on the phone on Thursday morning and a new date for a face-to-face meeting will be set, according to a diplomatic source. A Kremlin aide confirmed that Netanyahu canceled the meeting due to domestic political affairs, Russian media reported.

Thursday's meeting was meant to focus on regional affairs, the situation in Syria and the strengthening of the security coordination between Israel and Syria's armies. It would have been the first time the two leaders met in Moscow since the downing of the Russian spy plane in Syria in September 2018.

After the incident, which Russia blamed on Israel, Netanyahu's bureau unsuccessfully attempted to organize a meeting with Putin during the Paris Peace Forum in November. According to reports from Russia, Putin declined to meet Netanyahu at the forum.

The two ended up holding several talks on the sidelines of the event, which was hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron.

Wednesday's development came a day after Gantz called on Lapid to meet with him "tonight" to discuss potentially joining forces. Gantz made the appeal while launching the election slate of his party, Hosen L'Yisrael.

During the address – his second major campaign speech – Gantz launched a fierce attack against Netanyahu, describing the prime minister as the "sole ruler" of Israel's ruling party for the past decade "through incitement, deception and fearmongering."

In other political news Wednesday, the far-right party Otzma Yehudit – which is led by followers of the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane – agreed to a merger with Habayit Hayehudi and the National Union, a day before the Thursday deadline to formally register party rosters.

The announcement, which received the blessing of right-wing rabbis affiliated with the party's leadership, followed pressure by Netanyahu on National Union chairman Bezalel Smotrich and his Habayit Hayehudi counterpart Rafi Peretz to unite with the far right.

Both parties, whose leaders are due to meet later on Wednesday, still have to agree to finalize the union. Hawkish Smotrich had been thus far reluctant to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, fearing its far-right image would keep voters away. Habayit Hayehudi officials, led by MK Moti Yogev, are urging Peretz not to approve the agreement.

Meanwhile, Gesher party head Orly Levy-Abekasis announced Wednesday night that her party would run independently for Knesset and not join up with Benny Gantz’s Hosen L’Yisrael as had been widely anticipated, saying Gantz did not uphold agreements that had been reached with him.

In early January, when “Sérotonine,” the new novel by Michel Houellebecq, was not even in the stores yet, frenetic debates erupted in the French media: Did the misanthropic and embittered writer predict (with genius! with genius!) the so-called Yellow Vest protest in France, or did he (once again) spread 350 pages with annoying, provocative-to-the-point-of-boring and occasionally entertaining thoughts – as always suffused with descriptions of bizarre and misogynous sex – that will (once again) make critics foam at the mouth with anger, self-righteousness and shock?

The short answer to the question of prophecy as well as to that of besmearing all those pages is no. Regarding the question of descriptions of sex, the answer is of course in the affirmative. They are gloriously revolting, but relatively limited compared to the arcane parts of the book that deal with descriptions of cheeses, cows and restaurant menus, and come from a less-than-usual politically correct world – even for Houellebecq.

The explanation for this may lie in the gloomy situation of the story’s protagonist, who goes by the embarrassingly flowery name of Florent-Claude Labrouste, a middle-aged depressive type. Although the anti-depressant medicine (serotonin) prescribed by the doctor helps Labrouste keep his head above the gloomy swamp of his life, it totally destroys his bored and spent libido.

The long answer is far more complex. Houellebecq is neither a brilliant philosopher nor a prophet, but beyond all its magic tricks, most of which are cliched, this novel also holds up a crooked, sarcastic and depressing mirror before French society in particular and the West in general. Is there, concealed behind this mirror, a totally opposite world of values? That is not clear.

Like its predecessors, this novel – due to be published in English in the fall – does not offer consolation or hope, but unlike its predecessors, in the end a weak candle flickers in the darkness. A somewhat surprising candle, perhaps even somewhat amusing, but it at least presumes to present a small ray of light.

In the spirit of Houellebecq himself – and it’s hard to distinguish between him as narrator and writer, and his main character, who at the height of yearning and longing for what he describes as love of women, actually waxes nostalgic about their bodily orifices (or as he takes care to remind us specifically, the vagina, ass and mouth) – it could be said that the entire novel is told from the point of view of a penis whose time has past: droopy, isolated, helpless, sad and miserable.

That may be a somewhat brutal summary – in light of the large number of subjects that Houellebecq manages to cram into this picaresque journey of the protagonist to his not-so-glorious past – but it apparently captures the ideological foundation of the book, and should not be taken lightly at all.

In many senses, “Serotonin” really is a picaresque novel, mainly according to the French tradition. Houellebecq permits himself to enter and leave and once again enter the picaresque structure and to dabble in its attributes: a first-person story, a weak plot if any, no development or growth of the hero, a walk along a thin line of normative behavior, occasional breaches of the law and so on. The gaps between the classical genre and the story of Labrouste create no small amount of amusing irony and shed a particularly ludicrous and critical light (or actually a dark shadow) on French society and its present events.

Torn web of ties

Although Labrouste belongs to the upper-middle class and his ostensible place on the margins of society stems mainly from his own subjective feelings and the choices he has made all his life, like every picaresque protagonist he wanders from place to place, and time after time is dragged into adventures and encounters with people.

The encounters with the book’s secondary characters – mainly the women in his past, but also a former friend from school, the doctor who prescribes the medicine for him and more – are spread like a torn web of associations and connections: Every time it seems as if the hero is narrating the most recent years of his life, leading up to the present, in an orderly manner, he jumps backward and then forward again, and confuses the reader.

All the encounters are gloomy and alienated, and all stem from Labrouste's desperate and obsessive – and at the same time not particularly vigorous – desire to find out how and what really happened in his life. Because at the age of 46 he already feels that he has reached the end of the road and is trying to retrace the footsteps along the path he has taken until now. The entire essence of his journey into the past is a depressing search for what the hero, or Houellebecq, calls love, and perhaps also an undeclared quest for meaning.

The structural trick is only part of the sophistication of “Sérotonine.” It’s not easy to identify it, because it's concealed under the piles of words and thoughts that Houellebecq scatters about with irritating negligence, and a reasonable reader will find it difficult to get through them without getting angry, yawning or skipping several pages without missing a thing (are the folks at Flammarion afraid to mess with Houellebecq's dirty mouth and therefore don't edit the flow of his verbiage, or did he manage to convince them that it’s sacred?) – but it definitely exists and makes a strong impression.

Houellebecq knows how to maintain the choice, important elements of the genre, and at the end he brings them to a dramatic conclusion, which includes the element of religious or spiritual redemption and a description of the protagonist as someone who is sacrificing himself for what he sees as an effort to repair the world.

Labrouste is an official at the agriculture ministry who specialized in production of cheeses and also likes cows in general (they remind him of his warm childhood landscape). Like all of Houellebecq’s protagonists, he hates women in particular and people in general, is a heavy smoker, gets drunk and pollutes the environment for his own pleasure.

Although the book begins with his random and annoying encounter at a gas station in Spain with a young blond woman (of course, women over 40 are old, menopausal and out-of-bounds). The meeting ends with masturbation and a trip back to Paris – but only after this opening, which is not related to anything (nor does it connect to anything later on), does the story actually begin.

Labrouste lives with a Japanese partner named Yuzu, and the relationship between them is bitter and miserable. The choice of the name Yuzu is ironic and not coincidental: Yuzu is a plant that famous French pastry chefs like to use as an exotic and pretentious ingredient in elegant cakes and desserts, and Houellebecq’s Yuzu is no less elegant: She is smeared with layers of makeup that whiten her face to death, and with the deliberately aggravating racism typical of Houellebecq is described as the prototype of an odd, submissive and hypocritical Japanese woman.

While the main character is no longer capable of having sexual relations because of the anti-depressant that he takes, his partner betrays him. She participates in wild orgies filmed on video and her partners are dogs of all breeds and genders.

This horrifying description, which attributes a bizarre deviance to the Japanese woman (of course she's Japanese, right?) that even our sex-starved hero (at least he used to be like that, but his mind continues to fantasize) doesn’t find charming, is the last nail in the coffin of an unfortunate relationship that lasted for two years.

Labrouste decides to leave – but not simply to leave, but to disappear entirely. He resigns from his job, cancels the lease on his apartment, transfers his bank account and moves to a rundown hotel in a different neighborhood, which still allows people to smoke in some of its rooms.

Nothing new in 'deep France'

From here on in his new life, or perhaps his new death, will begin. Death may be Labrouste’s only desire, and indeed seems to be his top priority all the time. His parents, he says, committed suicide together the moment they discovered that his 64-year-old father had a malignant tumor. Labrouste sees that act as a gesture of great love, the likes of which, he realizes, he himself is totally incapable of experiencing.

From his hotel room he embarks on his tiring, erratic journey, filled with details about missed loves in the past, including several abortive attempts at making his drooping organ erect. At the center of that journey the meeting with Aymeric – a former friend from his agricultural college, in the region locals usually call “deep France,” the outlying farming areas – gradually begins to take a dominant place.

Houellebecq’s focus on “deep France,” once sanctified in the realm of old French politics, which for a long time now has turned its back on it and now worships urbanity and the global financial establishment, has misled most critics, who were impressed by the author's ostensible prediction of the Yellow Vest protest, the grass-roots populist movement for economic justice that began last November.

But the conflict between the agricultural periphery and the elite and the government in France really is nothing new. Just as the clash between globalization and competition among the European Common Market countries are not new. Truck drivers, sheep and pig farmers and others have for some time already been involved in violent clashes with officials in Brittany, and the humiliation of people from the periphery, including farmers, has long been reflected in votes for the ultranationalist right – first for Jean-Marie Le Pen and afterward his daughter.

There is no question that Houellebecq identifies with the rift between “deep,” peripheral France and Paris, which adorns itself with the feathers of a global city and is becoming cosmopolitan, involved and is increasingly open to immigrants of all religions and colors.

But that’s only part of his ideology, and there’s nothing new about it. It’s not surprising, for example, that his main character believes that there’s no difference between the "untamed France" of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and “La Republique En Marche” of Emanuel Macron. Both parties have bored him to the same extent.

The innovation in “Sérotonine” can be found in another layer of the book. Beyond the ragged plot, the language that flutters between dry simplicity and heartrending lyricism, and the bits of reality, some of which are totally unrelated to anything else and create a burdensome sense of rot (including the hero’s surveillance of a pedophilic ornithologist) – the main theme of loss of sexual potency has a disturbing significance that lasts long after you've finished reading.

The death of sexual potency is the sad price paid by the protagonist for suppressing the desire for death, which is the only desire that remains to him. Yes, Freud is turning over in his grave and shouting: “I said it first!”

In a most definite way, in Houellebecq the opposite of the sex drive – on which are based the longing, sorrow and regrets of the present hero, and in fact the existence and meaning of life of all the protagonists in his previous books – is Thanatos, the death instinct. There’s nothing in between. So when Labrouste ends his journey into the past, and all he has left is a limp sex organ and a meager bank account, he embarks on an affair with death.

First he engages in a sort of target practice; then he fantasizes that he will kill the young son of his former lover, in the off chance of restoring their love (their love? He never showed her love, and even betrayed her with his bored indifference); and in the end he gets to the real deal: the romantic thought of suicide.

Despite the darkness surrounding the book as it progresses toward its finale, or perhaps precisely because of it, at this point it begins to accumulate literary and even surprising human power. Labrouste imagines falling from the apartment in the alienated high-rise he ends up in for lack of choice (after his hotel becomes 100-percent smoke free), but is unable to actually kill himself. Instead he calculates the speed of the fall according to some known acceleration formula.

In effect, he is in a situation identical to that of Western society, in his opinion: impotent and depressed, with a rotten past behind it and a black future before it, consisting entirely of death and loss. It’s no coincidence that Larouste is reading Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.” While adding a few pornographic editorial comments that are not really original, he identifies with both books.

Suppressing urges

The great absurdity lies in the cure: In order to overcome the depression that is likely to lead to death, the anti-depressant suppresses the sex drive and thereby in effect kills the urge to live and leads to death. This is the pill that is supposed to kill death, but cannot do so, of course, and it finishes off what’s left of life. No serotonin will help here. Serotonin is a synthetic illusion, and the unfortunate work that is not redeemed by means of sex won’t be salvaged by suppressing sex either.

And that is the painful and pain-inflicting declaration of this novel, which reflects something precise about the signs of the time: The more permissive the Western world, and the more it seeks sexual stimulants some of which are mechanical and alienating – the more it is flooded by a wave of self-righteousness, purism and hatred of sexuality, and perhaps hatred of the will to live as well.

Many young people the world over have less sex today than their parents had; abstention is no less prevalent than polyamory and other new sexual fashions. These facts are only one aspect of a depressive phenomenon, which is of far greater significance than it would seem to be.

On the one hand, the terror of self-righteous political correctness on the part of ostensible liberals and the terror of conservative religious puritanism, which attacks with morbid obsessiveness anything that even resembles a demonstration of sexuality – these phenomena are both clearly becoming dominant. On the other, Donald Trump, president of the free world, boasts of the fact that he “grabs pussy,” and a South American president screams at a female journalist that “nobody will want to rape you, you’re so ugly.”

Emotional and ethical shallowness flattens every political and ideological opinion in general to the point of screaming that crosses political and social lines and blurs faces, viewpoints and differences. Houellebecq, in his unbridled way, feels and expresses this well.

Such an achievement would have been sufficient, but Houellebecq isn’t satisfied with the role of the writer or the thinker who warns of society’s ills. He sees himself as a far more important messenger. A hint of that can be found in what seems to be a very small paragraph right before the end, in which Labrouste describes how much he identifies with Jesus. No less! And like that man, who turned to God from the crucifix and begged, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” – Labrouste, or perhaps Houellebecq, is willing to be a martyr and to sacrifice himself so that those morons, in other words all of us, will open their eyes and understand that they’re destroying themselves and the world.

That’s the tiny and deceptive ray of light that Houellebecq offers his readers in "Sérotonine." Alas. Maybe he can't stand the fact that we were touched by the message that peers out, razor sharp, from the piles of verbiage and the chaos. What can you do? This is Houellebecq, after all: one moment serious and afterward unable to restrain himself and making fun of himself during a small attack of megalomania.

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1.6955658Wed, 20 Feb 2019 11:30:15Yaniv KubovichWed, 20 Feb 2019 10:16:18The Military Police have commenced a criminal investigation into the behavior of commanders during a navigation exercise in January during which a soldier drowned.

Sgt. Evyatar Yosefi, a member of the paratroopers’ elite reconnaissance unit, fell into the Hilazon Stream and drowned while crossing it with the unit during stormy conditions on the night of January 7. So far, the Military Police have questioned the company commander, the squad commanders and the commander of the unit’s training school on suspicion of involvement in Yosefi’s death.

Sources involved in the investigation expect the police to also question the commander of the Paratroops Brigade, Yaki Dolef, under caution, meaning as a suspect in a crime.

>> Analysis: Chilling report on Israeli soldier's death puts new army chief to the test

The chief of staff had appointed an in-house inquiry to determine exactly what happened on the night of January 7, when Yosefi drowned, but it has been suspended while the police investigation proceeds.

The officers questioned by the police in this case are not supposed to talk with the media about their versions of events. Nevertheless, based on the officers’ conversations with other members of the military, it seems they are all sticking to the same story, which is that they were following army regulations and commands. Yosefi’s death was an accident which would have been hard to prevent, they argue.

Soldiers who have given statements to either the Military Police or the in-house inquiry have also presented a united front, but their story differs radically from what the officers are saying. The soldiers’ version raises serious questions about the officers’ decisions prior to and during the exercise.

The discrepancy between the soldiers’ stories and those of the officers is what led the army to freeze the in-house inquiry until the Military Police investigation finishes, based on concern that the in-house inquiry might provide a chance for people to coordinate their testimony. But the gaps between the soldiers’ stories and those of the officers also make the police investigation much harder.

Such gaps are unusual when the people being questioned are all from the same military unit, and may indicate a lack of trust between the soldiers and their commanders.

A Haaretz investigation published earlier this week https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-soldier-s-death-in-military-exercise-was-preventable-testimonies-show-1.6952943 found that according to the soldiers, their parents and other people familiar with details of the incident, bad decisions were made before and during the navigation exercise. The commanders approved the exercise even though both the soldiers and medical personnel had warned about the stormy weather and the poor condition of the terrain. The officers also declined to stop the exercise even after some of the soldiers developed hypothermia or got stuck in the mud. Moreover, the officers approved crossing the Hilazon Stream despite being aware of flood warnings in force. Nor did they call off the crossing after some soldiers reported that they had fallen in and that the current was extremely strong. One soldier even said he almost drowned.

The Israel Defense Forces haven’t responded to these claims because of the police investigation. Any public statement could be viewed as interference in the investigation.

The Haaretz report found that officers had asked the soldiers to go easy on the company commander in their testimony, arguing that he was about to be demobilized and what they said could affect his future. The report also found that when the soldiers first reported that Yosefi had been swept away by the current, the officers didn’t immediately approve sending a medical crew to the site. Instead, they accused the soldiers of being “crybabies.”

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1.6955715Wed, 20 Feb 2019 10:58:40ReutersWed, 20 Feb 2019 10:52:05Acting Foreign Minister Israel Katz should apologize to Poland for his remarks, U.S. Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher said on Wednesday, commenting on the diplomatic row between two countries.

"I just felt that two strong allies like Israel and Poland, of course they are strong allies of the United States, shouldn't be using that kind of rhetoric. We are too important to each other not to work these things out," Mosbacher told reporters.

Right after being appointed acting foreign minister, Katz told Israel's i24 News on Monday: "I am the son of Holocaust survivors, we will never forgive and never forget, and there were many Poles who collaborated with the Nazis."

>> Analysis: With Poland, Netanyahu discovers the limits of playing with history

He continued to quote former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, saying: "Shamir said that every Pole suckled anti-Semitism with his mother's milk. Nobody will tell us how to express out stance and how to honor the dead."

World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder also responded to the rift on Wednesday, writing that, "As someone who has been deeply engaged in promoting Polish-Jewish understanding for over three decades, I can only decry the deterioration in relations between Israel and Poland."

"It is unfortunate for both Jews and Poles that obnoxious and offensive stereotypes that have caused so much pain and suffering on both sides over the years continue to circulate," Lauder added.

Katz's comments on Monday triggered Poland to pull out of the Visegrad summit, which was slated to be held in Jerusalem on Monday and Tuesday. Instead, the leaders of the remaining three countries – Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – held bilateral meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Katz's remarks were "racist and unacceptable" and that "this is not something that can be left without a response."

Jewish leaders in Poland said they were offended by Katz's comments. The leaders issued a statement Monday saying that accusing all Poles of anti-Semitism slighted thousands of Poles honored by Israel's Holocaust memorial center, Yad Vashem, for helping Jews during the Holocaust.

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, and Union of Jewish Religious Communities head Monika Krawczyk said Shamir's words "were unjust already when they were first said, in 1989."

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1.6955617Wed, 20 Feb 2019 10:16:57Jonathan LisWed, 20 Feb 2019 09:46:29Far-right party Otzma Yehudit, led by a followers of racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, announced Wednesday they agreed to a merger with Habayit Hayehudi and the National Union, a day before the Thursday deadline to formally register party rosters for the April 9 election.

In a statement, Otzma Yehudit said the move would prevent "the establishment of a leftist government, God forbid."

>> Analysis: The Kahanists and the homophobes: The two parties no one wants but Netanyahu needs

The announcement, which received the blessing of right-wing rabbis affiliated with the party's leadership, followed pressure by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on National Union chairman Bezalel Smotrich and his Habayit Hayehudi counterpart Rafi Peretz to unite with the far-right.

Both parties, whose leaders are due to meet later on Wednesday, still have to agree to finalize the union. Hawkish Smotrich had been thus far reluctant to join forces with Otzma Yehudit, fearing its far-right image would keep voters away. Habayit Hayehudi officials, led by MK Moti Yogev, are urging Peretz not to approve the agreement.

Otzma Yehudit officials agreed to a compromised discussed in recent days, placing its candidates on the 5th and 8th spots on the unified list. However, the party led by former National Union MK Michael Ben Ari and right-wing settler activists Baruch Marzel, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benzi Gopstein, has yet to announce its candidates.

The party claimed that according to "all data and most recent polls," it would "secure at least four seats," but said it nonetheless chose to support a pro-settlement coalition and a right-wing government. In fact, most recent polls put Otzma Yehudit below the electoral threshold. Habayit Hayehudi is predicted around four out of 120 Knesset seats, leaving Otzma Yehudit with no guarantee that its representative would make it to the Knesset after the election.

National Union's Smotrich also said his party is still looking into a possible merger with former minister and Shas lawmaker Eli Yisahi's Yahad party. "I would very much like to see Eli Yishai enter into this bloc," he told public broadcaster Kan.

Left-wing Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg said it would appeal to the Central Elections Committee in a bid to disqualify "Kahanist, Jewish terrorist" Otzma Yehudit. Kahane's party was disqualified from running in Israel's 1988 election.

Meanwhile, Hayamin Hehadash, led by ministers Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked who quit Habayit Hayehudi ahead of election, presented on Wednesday its Knesset ticket. After Bennett and Shaked in the top two slots, Hapoel Be'er Sheva soccer team owner Alona Barkat is in third place, followed by former IDF pilot and colonel Matan Kahana, sitting MK Shuli Moalem-Refaeli and Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post's deputy managing editor.